Detail to attention: exploiting visual tasks for selective rendering

The perceived quality of computer graphics imagery depends on the accuracy of the rendered frames, as well as the capabilities of the human visual system. Fully detailed, high fidelity frames still take many minutes even hours to render on today's computers. The human eye is physically incapable of capturing a moving scene in full detail. We sense image detail only in a 2° foveal region, relying on rapid eye movements, or saccades, to jump between points of interest. Our brain then reassembles these glimpses into a coherent, but inevitably imperfect, visual percept of the environment. In the process, we literally lose sight of the unimportant details. In this paper, we demonstrate how properties of the human visual system, in particular Inattentional Blindness, can be exploited to accelerate the rendering of animated sequences by applying a priori knowledge of a viewer's task focus. We show in a controlled experimental setting how human subjects will consistently fail to notice degradations in the quality of image details unrelated to their assigned task, even when these details fall under the viewers' gaze. We then build on these observations to create a perceptual rendering framework that combines predetermined task maps with spatiotemporal contrast sensitivity to guide a progressive animation system which takes full advantage of image-based rendering techniques. We demonstrate this framework with a Radiance ray-tracing implementation that completes its work in a fraction of the normally required time, with few noticeable artifacts for viewers performing the task.