DASC: Depth-of-Field Aware Scene Complexity Metric for 3D Visualization on Light Field Display

TL;DR

This paper introduces the DASC metric to quantify scene complexity in light field displays, enabling better control of depth of field rendering to optimize visual quality and reduce artifacts.

Contribution

The study proposes a novel scene complexity metric considering geometrical and positional factors specific to light field displays, and develops a model to predict preferred blurriness levels based on user preferences.

Findings

DASC effectively characterizes scene complexity for light field displays.

The model accurately predicts user-preferred blurring levels.

Subjective studies validate the correlation between DASC and perceived quality.

Abstract

Light field display is one of the technologies providing 3D immersive visualization. However, a light field display generates only a limited number of light rays which results in finite angular and spatial resolutions. Therefore, 3D content can be shown with high quality only within a narrow depth range notated as Depth of Field (DoF) around the display screen. Outside this range, due to the appearance of aliasing artifacts, the quality degrades proportionally to the distance from the screen. One solution to mitigate the artifacts is depth of field rendering which blurs the content in the distorted regions, but can result in the removal of scene details. This research focuses on proposing a DoF Aware Scene Complexity (DASC) metric that characterizes 3D content based on geometrical and positional factors considering the light field display's DoF. In this research, we also evaluate the observers' preference across different level of blurriness caused by DoF rendering ranging from sharp, aliased scenes to overly smoothed alias-free scenes. We have conducted this study over multiple scenes that we created to account for different types of content. Based on the outcome of subjective studies, we propose a model that takes the value of DASC metric as input and predicts the preferred level of blurring for the given scene as output.