Scene‐content‐sensitive real‐time adaptive foveated rendering

Abstract In recent years, techniques for accelerating rendering by exploiting the limitations of the human visual system have become increasingly prevalent. The foveated rendering method significantly reduces the computational requirements during rendering by reducing image quality in peripheral regions. In this paper, we propose a scene‐content‐sensitive real‐time adaptive foveated rendering method. First, we pre‐render the three‐dimensional (3D) scene at a low resolution. Then, we utilize the low‐resolution pre‐rendered image as input to extract edge, local contrast, and color features. Subsequently, we generate a screen‐space region division map based on the gaze point position. Next, we calculate the visual importance of each 16 × 16 pixel tile based on edge, local contrast, color, and screen‐space region. We then map the visual importance to the shading rate to generate a shading rate control map for the current frame. Finally, we complete the rendering of the current frame based on variable rate shading technology. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the visual quality of images near the foveal region while generating high quality foveal region images. Furthermore, our method can significantly improve performance compared to per‐pixel shading method and existing scene‐content‐based foveated rendering methods.