Modeling peripheral vision impact on perceptual quality of immersive images

Conventional images/videos are often rendered within the central area of human visual system (HVS) with uniform quality. Recent virtual reality (VR) device with head mounted display (HMD) extends the field of view (FoV) significantly to include both central and peripheral areas. It exhibits the unequal acuity of the quality sensation because of the non-uniform distribution of photoreceptors in our retina. Hence, we propose to study the impact of image qualities (with respect to the quantization stepsize q or spatial resolution s) in peripheral vision and conclude self-adaptive analytical models that have shown quite impressive accuracy through independent cross validations. These models can further be applied to assign different quality weights at different regions, so as to significantly reduce the transmission data size but without subjective quality loss.