Treffer: Visual attention models and applications to 3D computer graphics

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012. ; Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2012. ; Includes bibliographical refences. ; 3D computer graphics, with the increasing technological and computational opportunities, have advanced to very high levels that it is possible to generate very realistic computer-generated scenes in real-time for games and other interactive environments. However, we cannot claim that computer graphics research has reached to its limits. Rendering photo-realistic scenes still cannot be achieved in real-time; and improving visual quality and decreasing computational costs are still research areas of great interest. Recent e orts in computer graphics have been directed towards exploiting principles of human visual perception to increase visual quality of rendering. This is natural since in computer graphics, the main source of evaluation is the judgment of people, which is based on their perception. In this thesis, our aim is to extend the use of perceptual principles in computer graphics. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we present several models to determine the visually important, salient, regions in a 3D scene. Secondly, we contribute to use of de nition of saliency metrics in computer graphics. Human visual attention is composed of two components, the rst component is the stimuli-oriented, bottom-up, visual attention; and the second component is task-oriented, top-down visual attention. The main di erence between these components is the role of the user. In the top-down component, viewer's intention and task a ect perception of the visual scene as opposed to the bottom-up component. We mostly investigate the bottom-up component where saliency resides. We de ne saliency computation metrics for two types of graphical contents. Our rst metric is applicable to 3D mesh models that are possibly animating, and it extracts saliency values for each vertex of the mesh models. The second metric we propose ...