FovVideoVDP: a visible difference predictor for wide field-of-view video

Fig. 1. The heat-maps show our metric's predictions for 4 types of distortions (blur, JPEG compression, 30 Hz flicker and Gaussian additive noise) at three different eccentricities. The flicker is simulated as a dot that appears in every second frame. All types of artifacts are predicted to be much less noticeable when seen with peripheral vision at large eccentricities. Refer to Figure 20 for the color scale of the heat-map.

FovVideoVDP is a video difference metric that models the spatial, temporal, and peripheral aspects of perception. While many other metrics are available, our work provides the first practical treatment of these three central aspects of vision simultaneously. The complex interplay between spatial and temporal sensitivity across retinal locations is especially important for displays that cover a large field-of-view, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality displays, and associated methods, such as foveated rendering. Our metric is derived from psychophysical studies of the early visual system, which model spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity, cortical magnification and contrast masking. It accounts for physical specification of the display (luminance, size, resolution) and viewing distance. To validate the metric, we collected a novel foveated rendering dataset which captures quality degradation due to sampling and reconstruction. To demonstrate our algorithm's generality, we test it on 3 independent foveated video datasets, and on a large image quality dataset, achieving the best performance across all datasets when compared to the state-of-the-art.