Perceptual importance of lighting phenomena in rendering of animated water

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing research in perceptually-driven reductions in the costs of realistically rendered imagery. Water is complex and recognizable, and continues to be in the forefront of research. However, the contribution of individual lighting phenomena to the perceived realism of virtual water has not been addressed. All these phenomena have costs associated with their rendering, but does the visual benefit outweigh these costs? This study investigates the human perception of various illumination components found in water-rich virtual environments. The investigation uses a traditional psychophysical analysis to examine viewer perception of these lighting phenomena as they relate to the rendering cost, and ultimately reveals common trends in perceptual value. Five different scenes with a wide range of water and lighting dynamics were tested for perceptual value by one hundred participants. Our results provide an importance comparison for lighting phenomena in the rendering of water, and cost reductions can be made with little or no effect on the perceived quality of the imagery if viewed in a scenario similar to our testing. ACM Reference Format:Bojrab, M., Abdul-Massih, M., and Benes, B. 2013. Perceptual Importance of lighting phenomena in rendering of animated water.

Perceptual evaluation of liquid simulation methods

“…Having a reference video even stabilizes results from strongly di ering visualization styles as illustrated with the studies of C 0 . The reference video is also the reason why we believe our results do not contradict previous work that found signi cant in uence of rendering styles on perception for animated water (Bojrab et al 2013). Regarding liquid motions in the humanscale regime, our results indicate that the in uence of rendering can be made negligible by providing a visual reference.…”

“…In the area of deformable objects, Han and Keyser (2016) studied how visual details can in uence the perceived sti ness of materials. Bojrab et al (2013) studied how rendering styles of liquids in uence user opinion. While this work also considers liquids, our goal is in a way orthogonal to theirs.…”

“…While there are interesting studies that investigate individual visual stimuli (Han and Keyser 2016) and the in uence of di erent rendering methods for liquid simulations (Bojrab et al 2013), our goal is to calculate the perceptual scores for uid simulations on a high-level from animations produced with di erent simulation ACM Transactions on Graphics,Vol. 36,No.…”

“…While there are interesting studies that investigate individual visual stimuli (Han and Keyser 2016) and the in uence of di erent rendering methods for liquid simulations (Bojrab et al 2013), our goal is to calculate the perceptual scores for uid simulations on a high-level from animations produced with di erent simulation methods. We will demonstrate that a robust perceptual evaluation framework can be realized using crowd-sourced user studies that utilize carefully chosen simulation setups and a reference video.…”

PTRM: Perceived Terrain Realism Metric

“…Perceptual models have been further applied to improving virtual simulations [50], character animations [51,59], human body modeling [64], luid simulations [10,70], and crowd simulations [71]. High dynamic range imaging and tone mapping beneits from models of human light adaptation [41], color to gray conversions simulate human color sensitivity [48,65].…”