Saliency-Aware Foveated Path Tracing for Virtual Reality Rendering

Foveated rendering reduces computational load by distributing resources based on the human visual system. This enables the implementation of ray tracing in virtual reality applications, where a high frame rate is essential to achieve visual immersion. However, traditional foveation methods based solely on eccentricity cannot adequately account for the complex behavior of visual attention. This is one of the main reasons that leads to lower perceived quality compared to non-foveated techniques. In this study, we introduce a novel rendering pipeline that incorporates ocular attention through the use of visual saliency. Based on foveation saliency, our approach facilitates the real-time production of high-quality images utilizing path tracing by distributing samples according to saliency metrics derived from geometric and historical data. To further augment image quality, an adaptive filtering process, aligned with the saliency metrics, is employed to reduce visible artifacts in non-foveal regions. Our experiments prove that this novel approach can demonstrate superior performance compared to previous methods, both in terms of quantitative metrics and perceived visual quality.