Perceptual media compression for multiple viewers with feedback delay

Human eyes have limited perception capabilities; for example, only 2 degrees of our 140 degree vision field provide the highest quality of perception. Due to this fact the idea of perceptual focus emerged to allow a visual content to be changed in a way that only part of the visual field where a human gaze is directed is encoded with a high quality. The image quality in the periphery can be reduced without a viewer noticing it. This compression approach allows a significant decrease in the number of bits required for image encoding, and in the case of the 3D image rendering, it decreases the computational burden. A number of previous researchers have investigated the topic of perceptual focus but only for a single viewer. In our research we investigate a dynamically changing multi-viewer scenario. In this type of scenario a number of people are watching the same visual content at the same time. Each person has his/her own perceptual focus area which changes over time. The visual content is sent through a network with a fixed delay/lag which provides an additional challenge to the whole scheme. The goal of our work was to investigate and develop a method of multi-viewer perceptual focus zones adaptation for real-time media perceptual compression and transmission. In our research we also look into the impact that such a method can have on transmission bandwidth and computational burden reduction.