Foveated Rendering Border Area Blending
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Solution Overview
Problem
Foveated rendering in HMD devices results in unsmoothed boundaries between high-resolution foveal and low-resolution peripheral image regions, leading to a jarring user experience due to differences in resolution, which existing technologies fail to effectively smooth.
Innovation Solution
A display driver system that includes interface, image processing, and drive circuitry to upscale the full frame image, merge it with a foveal image, and render a foveated image with a border area that smoothly blends the two regions, using techniques such as alpha blending and weighted sums to mitigate the unsmoothed boundary issue.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If foveated rendering is implemented to reduce processing overhead by rendering different regions at different resolutions, then processing efficiency is improved, but the boundary between high-resolution foveal and low-resolution peripheral regions becomes unsmoothed and jarring
Solution Approach 1:
A border area is introduced as an intermediary region between the high-resolution foveal region and low-resolution peripheral region. This border area acts as a transition zone that blends the two regions together, using pixel values from both the foveal image and upscaled full frame image to create a smooth gradient transition, thereby eliminating the jarring boundary effect while preserving the processing efficiency benefits of foveated rendering
Solution Approach 2:
The resolution parameter is changed dynamically across different regions of the display. The foveal region uses high resolution for detailed rendering, the peripheral region uses low resolution for efficiency, and the border area uses intermediate resolution values that transition smoothly between the two extremes, creating a continuous visual experience without abrupt changes
2Manufacturing precision
If the full frame image is upscaled to match the display panel resolution, then the peripheral region can be rendered at higher quality, but the processing overhead and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The image is segmented into three distinct regions: the foveal region, the peripheral region, and the border area. Each region is processed independently with different resolution requirements. The foveal region receives high-resolution processing, the peripheral region receives low-resolution processing, and the border area receives intermediate processing, thereby reducing overall processing overhead while maintaining image quality where needed
Solution Approach 2:
Different quality levels are applied locally to different regions of the display. The foveal region receives high-quality rendering to match human visual acuity, the peripheral region receives low-quality rendering to reduce computational load, and the border area receives intermediate quality to ensure smooth transitions, optimizing the balance between image quality and processing resources
Data Source
AI summary
A display driver includes interface circuitry, image processing circuitry, and drive circuitry. The interface circuitry is configured to receive a full frame image and a foveal image from a source external to the display driver. The image processing circuitry is configured to: upscale the full frame image; render a foveated image from the upscaled full frame image and the foveal image. The foveated image includes a foveal area based on the foveal image, a peripheral are based on the upscaled full frame image, and a border area based on the foveal image and the upscaled full frame image. The border area being located between the foveal area and the peripheral area. The drive circuitry is configured to drive a display panel using the foveated image.