Perception-based global illumination, rendering, and animation techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we consider applications of perceptionbased video quality metrics to improve the performance of global lighting computations and rendering of animation sequences. To control the computation of animation frames we use the Animation Quality Metric (AQM) which is an extended version of the Visible Difference Predictor (VDP) developed by Daly. We show two applications of the AQM: (1) the rendering of high-quality walkthroughs for static environments and (2) the computation of global illumination for dynamic environments.To improve the rendering performance of our walkthrough solution we use a hybrid of the ray tracing and Image-Based Rendering (IBR) techniques. In our rendering solution we derive as many pixels as possible using inexpensive IBR techniques without affecting the animation quality. The AQM is used to automatically guide such a hybrid rendering.Also, we present a method for efficient global illumination computation in dynamic environments by taking advantage of temporal coherence of lighting distribution. The method is embedded in the framework of stochastic photon tracing and density estimation techniques. The AQM is used to keep noise inherent in stochastic methods below the sensitivity level of the human observer. As a result a perceptually-consistent quality across all animation frames is obtained. Furthermore, the computation cost is reduced compared to the traditional approaches operating solely in the spatial domain.

Perceptual Metrics for Static and Dynamic Triangle Meshes

“…Myszkowski [Mys02] proposed an extension of the VDP for quality evaluation of computergenerated animations and applied such metrics to speedup global illumination rendering. The application of these spatio-temporal perceptual metrics in the context of 3D model visual fidelity evaluation has, to our knowledge, never been investigated.…”

A Comparison of Perceptually-Based Metrics for Objective Evaluation of Geometry Processing

“…One of the first attempts to integrate image movement, visual attention and saliency was the work of Yee et al [19]. Myszkowski [20] proposed an extension of the VDP for quality evaluation of computer-generated animations and apply such metrics to speed-up global illumination rendering. The application of these spatiotemporal perceptual metrics in the context of 3D models visual fidelity evaluation has never been investigated from our knowledge.…”

“…So, the objects' movement is another important factor that the perceptual metrics should taken into account. The metric of Yee et al [19] and Myszkowski [20] for computer animations could represent a good base for integrating also the effect of the user interaction (for example for video games applications) into model-based perceptual metrics.…”

Perceptual rendering of participating media

“…The cost of such metrics were reduced in Ramasubramanian et al [1999] by precomputing the spatial frequency component from a cheaper estimate of the scene image. Spatiotemporal sensitivity of the human visual system was later added to Dalyís VDP to create a perceptually based animation-quality metric (AQM) [Myszkowski 2002], which was used to guide a hybrid ray tracing and image-based rendering (IBR) approach to improve rendering performance in a key frame-based animation sequence. Myskowski's framework assumed that the eye tracks all objects in a scene and the AQM added computational overhead to the rendering process.…”