Variable-resolution display techniques present visual information in a display using more than one resolution. For example, gaze-contingent variable-resolution displays allocate computational resources for image generation preferentially to the area around the center of gaze, where visual sensitivity to detail is the greatest. Using such displays reduces the amount of computational resources required as compared with traditional uniform-resolution displays. The theoretical benefits, imple-mentational issues, and behavioral consequences of variable-resolution displays are reviewed. A mathematical analysis of computational efficiency for a two-region variable-resolution display is conducted. The results are discussed in relation to applications that are limited by computational resources, such as virtual reality, and applications that are limited by bandwidth, such as internet image transmission. The potential for variable-resolution display techniques as a viable future technology is discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Adler, F. H. (1965). Physiology of the eye (4th ed.). Saint Louis, MO: Mosby.
2.
Anstis, S. (1974). A chart demonstrating variations in acuity with retinal position. Vision Research, 14, 589–592.
3.
Basu, A. & Wiebe, K. J. (1998). Enhancing videoconferencing using spatially varying sensing. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 28, 137–148.
4.
Bertera, J. H., & Rayner, K. (2000). Eye movements and the span of the effective stimulus in visual search. Perception and Psychophysics, 63, 576–585.
5.
Burr, D.Morrone, C., & Ross, J. (1994). Selective suppression of the magnocellular visual pathway during saccadic eye movement. Nature, 371, 511–513.
6.
Chang, E. C., Yap, C., & Yen, T.-J. (1997). Realtime visualization of large images over a thinwire. In IEEE visualization (pp. 45–48). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
7.
Dagnelie, G. & Massof, R. W. (1996). Toward an artificial eye. IEEE Spectrum, 335, 20–29.
8.
Danforth, R.Duchowski, A. T., Geist, R., & McAliley, E. (2000). A platform for gaze-contingent virtual environments. In Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Smart Graphics Symposium (Vol. 4, pp. 66–70). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI.
9.
Duchowski, A. T. (1998a). Incorporating the viewer's point of regard (POR) In gaze-contingent virtual environments. In M. T. Bolas, S. S. Fisher, & J. O. Merritt (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 3295. Stereoscopic displays and virtual reality systems V (pp. 332–343). Bellingham, WA: SPIE - International Society for Optical Engineering.
10.
Duchowski, A. T. (1998b). Representing multiple regions of interest with waveless. In S. A. Rajala & M. Rabbani (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 3309. Visual communications and image processing (pp. 975–986). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -International Society for Optical Engineering.
11.
Duchowski, A. T. (2000). Acuity-matching resolution degradation through wavelet coefficient scaling. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 9, 1437–1439.
12.
Duchowski, A. T., & McCormick, B. H. (1995a). Preattentive considerations for gaze-contingent image processing. In B. E. Rogowitz & J. P. Allebach (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 2411. Human vision, visual processing, and digital display VI (pp. 128–139). Bellingham, WA: SPIE---International Society for Optical Engineering.
13.
Duchowski, A. T., & McCormick, B. H. (1995b). Simple multires-olution approach for representing multiple regions of interest (ROIs). In L. T. Wu (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 2501. Visual communication and image processing (pp. 175–186). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
14.
Duchowski, A. T., & McCormick, B. H. (1996). Modeling visual attention for gaze-contingent video processing. In 9th Image and Mutidimensional Digital Signal Processing Workshop (pp. 130–131). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
15.
Duchowski, A. T., & McCormick, B. H. (1998). Gaze-contingent video resolution degradation. In B. E. Rogowitz & T. N. Pappas (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 3299. Human vision and electronic imaging III (pp. 318–329). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
16.
Egeth, H. E., & Yantis, S. (1997). Visual attention: Control, representation, and time course. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 269–297.
17.
Fernie, A. (1995). Head-mounted display with dual resolution. SID Applications Digest, 3/4, 37–40.
18.
Frajka, T.Sherwood, P. G., & Zeger, K. (1997). Progressive image coding with spatially variable resolution. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing (Vol. 1, pp. 53–56). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
19.
Funkhouser, T. & Li, K. (2000). Large-format displays. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 204, 20–21.
20.
Geisler, W. S., & Perry, J. S. (1998). A real-time foveated multires-olution system for low-bandwidth video communication. In Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 3299. Human vision and electronic imaging (pp. 294–305). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
21.
Geisler, W. S., & Perry, J. (1999). Variable-resolution displays for visual communication and simulation. In Proceedings of the Society for Information Display (Vol. 30, pp. 420–423). San Jose, CA: Society for Information Display.
22.
Goto, M.Toriu, T., & Tanahashi, J. (2001). Effect of size of attended area on contrast sensitivity function. Vision Research, 41, 1483–1487.
23.
Hubel, D. H. (1988). Eye, brain, and vision.New York: Scientific American Library.
24.
Inhoff, A. W., Starr, M., Liu, W., & Wang, J. (1998). Eye-movement-contingent display changes are not compromised by flicker and phosphor persistence. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 101–106.
25.
Itti, L.Niebur, E., & Koch, C. (1998). A model of saliency-based fast visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 20, 1254–1259.
26.
Kortum, P. T., & Geisler, W. S. (1996). Implementation of a foveat-ed image-coding system for bandwidth reduction. In Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 2657. Human vision and electronic imaging (pp. 350–360). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
27.
Lee, S.Pattichis, M. S., & Bovik, A. C. (2001). Foveated video compression with optimal rate control. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 10, 977–992.
28.
Levoy, M. & Whitaker, R. (1990). Gaze-directed volume rendering. In Proceedings of the 1990 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (pp. 217–223). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
29.
Lindstrom, P., & Turk, G. (2000). Image-driven simplification. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 19, 204–241.
30.
Loschky, L. C., & McConkie, G. W. (2000). User performance with gaze contingent multresolutional displays. In Proceedings of the Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (Vol. 1, pp. 97–103). New York: Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
31.
Luebke, D. P. (2001). A developer's survey of polygonal simplification algorithms. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 213, 24–35.
32.
Luebke, D. P., Hallen, B., Newfield, D., & Watson, B. (2000). Perceptually driven simplification using gaze-directed rendering(University of Virginia Tech. Report CS-2000-04). Charlottes-ville: University of Virginia.
33.
McCauley, M. E., & Sharkey, T. J. (1992). Cybersickness: Perception of self-motion in virtual environments. Presence, 1, 311–318.
34.
McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception and Psychophysics, 17, 578–586.
35.
Murphy, H. & Duchowski, A. T. (2001). Gaze-contingent level of detail rendering. In EuroGraphics 2001 (short presentations, pp. 1--10). Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland: EuroGraphics.
36.
Niebur, E. & Koch, C. (1996). Control of selective visual attention: Modeling the "where" pathway. In D. S. Touretzky, M. C. Mozer, & M. E. Hasselmo (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing (Vol. 8, pp. 802–808). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
37.
Ohshima, T.Yamamoto, H., & Tamura, H. (1996). Gaze-directed adaptive rendering for interacting with virtual space. In Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (pp. 103–110). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
38.
O'Regan, J. K. (1990). Eye movements and reading. In E. Kowler (Eds.), Eye movements and their role in visual and cognitive processes (pp. 395–453). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
39.
Osberger, W. & Maeder, A. J. (1998). Automatic identification of perceptually important regions in an image. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 701–704). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.
40.
Osberger, W.Maeder, A. J., & Bergmann, N. (1998). A perceptually based quantization technique for MPEG encoding. In B. E. Rogowitz & T. N. Pappas (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 3299. Human vision and electronic imaging III (pp. 148–159). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
41.
Parkhurst, D.Culurciello, E., & Niebur, E. (2000). Evaluating variable resolution displays with visual search: Task performance and eye movements. In Proceedings of the ACM Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (pp. 105–109). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
42.
Parkhurst, D. J., Law, K., & Niebur, E. (2002). Modeling the role of salience in the allocation of overt visual selective attention. Vision Research, 421, 107–123.
43.
Pausch, R.Crea, T., & Conway, M. (1992). A literature survey for virtual environments: Military flight simulator visual systems and simulator sickness. Presence, 1, 344–363.
44.
Peli, E. & Geri, G. A. (1999). Testing a simulation of peripheral vision using an image discrimination task. In Proceedings of the Society for Information Display (Vol. 30, pp. 424–427). San Jose, CA: Society for Information Display.
45.
Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 3–25.
46.
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in readings and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychonomic Bulletin, 124, 372–422.
47.
Reeves, T. H., & Robinson, J. A. (1996). Adaptive foveation of MPEG video. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (pp. 231–241). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
48.
Saida, S. & Ikeda, M. (1979). Useful visual field size for pattern perception. Perception and Psychophysics, 25, 119–125.
49.
Schikore, D.Fischer, R., Frank, R., Gaunt, R., Hobson, J., & Whitlock, B. (2000). High-resolution multiprojector display walls. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 20, 38–44.
50.
Schyns, P. G., & Olivia, A. (1997). Flexible, diagnosticity-driven, rather than fixed, perceptually determined scale selection in scene and face recognition. Perception, 26, 1027–1038.
51.
Shioiri, S. (1993). Postsaccadic processing of the retinal image during picture scanning. Perception and Psychophysics, 53, 305–314.
52.
Shioiri, S. & Ikeda, M. (1989). Useful resolution for picture perception as a function of eccentricity. Perception, 18, 347–361.
53.
Stelmach, L. B., Tam, W. J., & Hearty, P. J. (1991). Static and dynamic spatial resolution In image coding: An investigation of eye movements. In B. E. Rogowitz, M. H. Brill, & J. P. Allebach (Eds.), Proceedings of SPIE: Vol. 1453. Human vision, visual processing, and digital display II (pp. 147–152). Bellingham, WA: SPIE -- International Society for Optical Engineering.
54.
van Diepen, P. M. J. (1997). A pixel-resolution video switcher for eye-contingent display changes. Spatial Vision, 10, 335–344.
55.
van Diepen, P. M. J., De Graef, P., & van Rensbergen, J. (1994). On-line control of moving masks and windows on a complex background using the ATVista Videographics Adapter. Behavior Research Methods, 26, 454–460.
56.
van Diepen, P. M. J., Ruelens, L., and d'Ydewalle, G. (1999). Brief foveal masking during scene perception. Acta Psychologica, 101, 91–103.
57.
van Diepen, P. M. J., & Wampers, M. (1998). Scene exploration with Fourier-filtered peripheral information. Perception, 27, 1141–1151.
58.
van Diepen, P. M. J., Wampers, M., & d'Ydewalle, G. (1998). Functional division of the visual field: Moving masks and moving windows. In G. Underwood (Eds.), Eye guidance in reading and scene perception (pp. 337–355). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
59.
Van Essen, D., & Anderson, C. (1990). Information processing strategies and pathways In the primate retina and visual cortex. In S. F. Zornetzer, J. L. Davis, & C. Lau (Eds.), An introduction to neural and electronic networks (pp. 43–72). San Diego, CA: Academic.
60.
Virsu, V., & Rovamo, J. (1979). Visual resolution, contrast sensitivity, and the cortical magnification factor. Experimental Brain Research, 37, 475–494.
61.
Volkman, F. C., Riggs, L. A., White, K. D., & Moore, R. K. (1978). Contrast sensitivity during saccadic eye movement. Vision Research, 18, 1193–1200.
62.
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of vision.Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
63.
Yeshurun, Y., & Carrasco, M. (2000). The locus of attentional effects in texture segmentation. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 622–627.
64.
Young, L. R., & Sheena, D. (1975). Survey of eye movement recording techniques. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 7, 397–429.
