Movement bias in visual attention for perceptually-guided selective rendering of animations

The Human Visual System (HVS) is a key part of the rendering pipeline. The human eye is only capable of sensing image detail in a 2° foveal region, relying on rapid eye movements, or saccades, to jump between points of interest. These points of interest are prioritised based on the saliency of the objects in the scene or the task the user is performing. These "glimpses" of a scene are then assembled by the HVS into a coherent, but inevitably imperfect, visual perception of the environment. In this process, much detail, which the HVS deems unimportant, may literally go unnoticed.The major obstacle for real-time rendering of high fidelity graphics is computational complexity. Visual science research has shown that movement in the background of a scene may influence how subjects perceive foreground objects. In this paper we use knowledge of the HVS to show that we can selectively render walk-throughs without perceptual loss of quality, at significantly reduced time, if high saliency movement is present during the animation.