Visual-Perception-Driven Reuse Method of Illumination Computation in Rendering Stereoscopic Images of 3D Scenes

Stereoscopic rendering of 3D scenes directly based on Monte Carlo path tracing is usually expensive and 3D warping techniques result in inaccurate specular reflections and holes. We proposed a visual-perception-driven reuse method of illumination computation in rendering stereoscopic images of 3D scenes. Firstly, we rendered two views with a limited number of path samples to gather auxiliary information such as visible surface points, saliency maps, and background masks and synthesized the left image. Secondly, we applied background reusing and 3D warping to reuse the results of illumination computation thus avoiding some tracing calculations. Finally, we rendered the specular regions and the remaining holes with saliency-assigned paths and synthesized the right image. Experiments with the use of general scenes of PBRT-V3 showed the proposed method produced accurate specular reflections and provided better perceptual quality, and its average PSNR, SSIM and VSNR were improved by 5.68%–22.62%, 6.38%–19.36% and 4.25%–34.53%, respectively, compared with the existing methods based on 3D warping and path tracing.