A Perceptual Model for Eccentricity-dependent Spatio-temporal Flicker Fusion and its Applications to Foveated Graphics

TL;DR

This paper presents a new perceptual model that predicts how human vision perceives flicker across different eccentricities, enabling more efficient foveated graphics by exploiting both spatial and temporal visual sensitivities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel eccentricity-dependent flicker fusion model that jointly considers space and time, validated through user studies, and demonstrates significant bandwidth savings for foveated rendering.

Findings

Model accurately predicts flicker fusion thresholds across eccentricities.

Enables 7x bandwidth reduction compared to spatial-only models.

Provides foundation for temporally foveated graphics techniques.

Abstract

Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) displays strive to provide a resolution, framerate and field of view that matches the perceptual capabilities of the human visual system, all while constrained by limited compute budgets and transmission bandwidths of wearable computing systems. Foveated graphics techniques have emerged that could achieve these goals by exploiting the falloff of spatial acuity in the periphery of the visual field. However, considerably less attention has been given to temporal aspects of human vision, which also vary across the retina. This is in part due to limitations of current eccentricity-dependent models of the visual system. We introduce a new model, experimentally measuring and computationally fitting eccentricity-dependent critical flicker fusion thresholds jointly for both space and time. In this way, our model is unique in enabling the prediction of temporal information that is imperceptible for a certain spatial frequency, eccentricity, and range of luminance levels. We validate our model with an image quality user study, and use it to predict potential bandwidth savings 7x higher than those afforded by current spatial-only foveated models. As such, this work forms the enabling foundation for new temporally foveated graphics techniques.