Perceptually Driven Interactive Rendering

We present a framework for accelerating interactive rendering, grounded in psychophysical models of visual perception. This framework is applicable to rendering techniques that regulate resolution—and hence rendering load—using a hierarchy of local simplification operations. Our method drives those local operations directly by perceptual metrics: the effect of each simplification on the final image is considered in terms of the contrast the operation will induce in the image and the spatial frequency of the resulting change. A simple and conservative perceptual model determines under what conditions the simplification operation will be perceptible, enabling imperceptible simplification in which operations are performed only when judged imperceptible. Alternatively, simplifications may be ordered according to their perceptibility, providing a principled approach to best-effort rendering. Our approach addresses many interesting topics in the acceleration of interactive rendering, including imperceptible simplification, silhouette preservation, and gazedirected rendering. We demonstrate our framework applied to two quite different multiresolution rendering paradigms: viewdependent polygonal simplification and the QSplat point-based rendering system of Rusinkiewicz and Levoy [26].