Perception, Attention, and Resources: A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Graphics Rendering

We describe work to control graphics ren­ dering under limited computational resources by taking a decision-theoretic perspective on perceptual costs and computational savings of approximations. The work extends earlier work on the control of rendering by introduc­ ing methods and models for computing the expected cost associated with degradations of scene components. The expected cost is com­ puted by considering the perceptual cost of degradations and a probability distribution over the attentional focus of viewers. We re­ view the critical literature describing findings on visual search and attention, discuss the implications of the findings, and introduce models of expected perceptual cost. Finally, we discuss policies that harness information about the expected cost of scene components.