Perceptual Visibility Model for
Temporal Contrast Changes in Periphery

Cara Tursun1,2     Piotr Didyk1

1Università della Svizzera italiana    2University of Groningen

Abstract:

Modeling perception is critical for many applications and developments in computer graphics to optimize and evaluate content generation techniques. Most of the work to date has focused on central (foveal) vision. However, this is insufficient for novel wide-field-of-view display devices, such as virtual and augmented reality headsets. Furthermore, the perceptual models proposed for the fovea do not readily extend to the off-center, peripheral visual field, where human perception is drastically different. In this article, we focus on modeling the temporal aspect of visual perception in the periphery. We present new psychophysical experiments that measure the sensitivity of human observers to different spatio-temporal stimuli across a wide field of view. We use the collected data to build a perceptual model for the visibility of temporal changes at different eccentricities in complex video content. Finally, we discuss, demonstrate, and evaluate several problems that can be addressed using our technique. First, we show how our model enables injecting new content into the periphery without distracting the viewer, and we discuss the link between the model and human attention. Second, we demonstrate how foveated rendering methods can be evaluated and optimized to limit the visibility of temporal aliasing.

Acknowledgements:

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement N◦ 804226 PERDY).