Low Sampling Densities using a psychovisual approach

Abstract

It has long been observed that the keenness of sight is lower for diagonal directions than for horizontal or vertical ones. This anisotropy of the human eye response can be exploited by using a non-orthogonal sampling pattern with a reduced sampling density. After an introduction to the two-dimensional sampling theory, it is shown that quincunx sampling is well suited to this characteristic. Then a sampling scheme based on this approach is described. This effectively leads to halving the sampling density and thereby the computing time of ray-traced pictures.