Interocular blur and sharpness differences improve visual detail perception
Dichoptic Foveation
GraphicsPerformance
Summary
People’s eyes sometimes see slightly different images, and the brain merges them into one picture. This paper studied what happens when one eye sees a blurry image while the other eye sees a sharper one, especially across different parts of the vision field. The researchers used a virtual reality headset to show these images and measured how people perceived them. They created a simple model to describe how these differences are combined by the brain and used it to improve how virtual reality scenes are rendered, making detailed areas clearer while saving computing power elsewhere.
What this means in practice
- •For virtual reality developers: Enhance VR rendering by using eye-specific blur and sharpness to boost perceived detail with less computing cost.$Commercial implications: Enables VR headsets and applications to deliver sharper visuals efficiently by selectively blending sharp and blurred images for each eye.
- •For display technologists: Improve image quality in stereoscopic displays by applying interocular frequency adjustments based on viewer eccentricity.
Authors
Henry Kam, Colin Groth, Jenna Kang, Pratham Saraf, Qi Sun, Kenneth Chen
Abstract
Interocular differences in visual perception can induce a variety of effects when fused by the brain. For example, prior works have found that carefully crafted binocular differences in local detail can improve contrast. It has also been found that when the frequency content of two stimuli are slightly different, blur suppression leads to a fused percept that is typically dominated by the sharper image. In this paper, we develop a psychophysical framework to measure the perception of natural image stimuli with interocular frequency differences across the visual field. To this end, we study the effect of dichoptic foveation, which we define as the application of blur to one eye and a simultaneous sharpening filter to the other. Stimuli were viewed in a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) and placed at different retinal eccentricities. Study data were scaled to a perceptual just objectionable difference (JOD) scale, and a 4D model was fit to it; our results suggest that interocular frequency differences can be well described by a simple computational model. We applied the model in a realistic VR scenario with free exploration of 360° videos to improve a base foveated rendering system by enhancing high frequency information dichoptically.