Selective quality rendering by exploiting human inattentional blindness

Abstract

There are two major influences on human visual attention: bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing is the automatic direction of gaze to lively or colourful objects as determined by low-level vision. In contrast, top-down processing is consciously directed attention in the pursuit of predetermined goals or tasks. Previous work in perception-based rendering has exploited bottom-up visual attention to control detail (and therefore time) spent on rendering parts of a scene. In this paper, we demonstrate the principle of Inattentional Blindness, a major side effect of top-down processing, where portions of the scene unrelated to the specific task go unnoticed. In our experiment, we showed a pair of animations rendered at different quality levels to 160 subjects, and then asked if they noticed a change. We instructed half the subjects to simply watch our animation, while the other half performed a specific task during the animation. When parts of the scene, outside the focus of this task, were rendered at lower quality, almost none of the task-directed subjects noticed, whereas the difference was clearly visible to the control group. Our results clearly show that top-down visual processing can be exploited to reduce rendering times substantially without compromising perceived visual quality in interactive tasks.

A psychophysical study of fixation behavior in a computer game

“…However, it was shown that task-related gaze behavior can dominate over saliency [Land et al 1999]. Per-pixel measures of task relevance have more recently appeared, and these are called task maps [Cater et al 2002;Navalpakkam and Itti 2005].…”

Acoustic Rendering and Auditory–Visual Cross‐Modal Perception and Interaction

“…Limitations of the human sensory system have been used in order to improve the performance of rendering systems. Auditory and visual limitations have been exploited in order to decrease the auditory (Tsingos et al, 2004;Moeck et al, 2007) or visual (Cater et al, 2002;Kozlowski and Kautz, 2007;Ramanarayanan et al, 2007Ramanarayanan et al, , 2008 rendering complexity with no or little perceivable quality difference to a user. Moreover, it has been shown that it is possible to increase the perceptual quality of a stimulus in one modality by stimulating another modality at the same time (Mastoropoulou et al, 2005a;Harvey et al, 2010).…”

Visual attention in 3D video games

“…Visual attention is gaining more importance in graphics rendering. Recently, results from visual attention research [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] are being adopted by computer graphics research. Due to speed limitations, there has been a movement to use a perception-based rendering approach where the rendering process itself takes into account where the user is most likely looking [4].…”