Improving Depth Perception in Immersive Media Devices by Addressing Vergence-Accommodation Conflict.

Recently, immersive media devices have seen a boost in popularity. However, many problems still remain. Depth perception is a crucial part of how humans behave and interact with their environment. Convergence and accommodation are two physiological mechanisms that provide important depth cues. However, when humans are immersed in virtual environments, they experience a mismatch between these cues. This mismatch causes users to feel discomfort while also hindering their ability to fully perceive object distances. To address the conflict, we have developed a technique that encompasses inverse blurring into immersive media devices. For the inverse blurring, we utilize the classical Wiener deconvolution approach by proposing a novel technique that is applied without the need for an eye-tracker and implemented in a commercial immersive media device. The technique's ability to compensate for the vergence-accommodation conflict was verified through two user studies aimed at reaching and spatial awareness, respectively. The two studies yielded a statistically significant 36% and 48% error reduction in user performance to estimate distances, respectively. Overall, the work done demonstrates how visual stimuli can be modified to allow users to achieve a more natural perception and interaction with the virtual environment.

Teleconsultations for mental health: Recommendations from a Delphi panel.

Introduction: The use of teleconsultations for mental health has drastically increased since 2020 due to the Covid19 pandemic. In the present paper, we aimed to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of teleconsultations for mental health compared to face-to-face consultations, and to provide recommendations in this domain. Methods: The recommendations were gathered using a Delphi methodology. The expert panel (N = 21) included professionals from the health and ICT domains. They answered questions via two rounds of web surveys, and then discussed the results in a plenary meeting. Some of the questions were also shared with non-experts (N = 104). Results: Both the experts and the non-experts with teleconsultation experience reported a general satisfaction concerning teleconsultations. A SWOT analysis revealed several strengths and opportunities of teleconsultations for mental health, but also several weaknesses and threats. The experts provided a set of practical recommendations for the preparation and organization of teleconsultations for mental health. Discussion: Teleconsultations for mental health have the potential to allow access to care for patients in remote and isolated areas. Thus, their use will unlikely be discontinued after the end of the pandemic. In this context, we suggest that the collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and interface designers is crucial to improve usability and user experience for both clinicians and patients. The importance of teaching teleconsultation skills and informing the public on the features of teleconsultations (e.g., data privacy/security) is also highlighted.

RiNeo MR: A mixed-reality tool for newborn life support training.

The first minute of life, the Golden Minute, has been defined as a critical window in which fundamental physiological processes occur for establishing spontaneous ventilation in a newborn. Resuscitation is more likely to succeed if it is performed properly and at the right time. In this scenario, simulation is an appropriate tool for training and evaluating the abilities of all staff working in the delivery room, as well as students. As simulations require a high degree of immersivity in order to be effective, the use of technologies like Virtual (VR) and mixed reality (MR) have garnered more interest in training. Currently, some VR and MR applications have been developed for adult life support training, but neonatal tools are still missing. To overcome this limitation, we present RiNeo MR, a prototype of a MR simulator for neonatal resuscitation training. The simulator consists of (i) a sensorized physical model of the newborn that allows monitoring chest compressions; (ii) a VR head mounted display that allows visualizing a virtual 3D model of the manikin and scenarios of the delivery and operating rooms. This enables students, and healthcare providers to be immersed in realistic hospital settings while performing life support procedures on the newborn manikin. Clinical Relevance-The newborn life support training (NLS) in facilities reduces term intrapartum-related deaths by 30%.

Mitigating Cybersickness in Virtual Reality Systems through Foveated Depth-of-Field Blur.

Cybersickness is one of the major roadblocks in the widespread adoption of mixed reality devices. Prolonged exposure to these devices, especially virtual reality devices, can cause users to feel discomfort and nausea, spoiling the immersive experience. Incorporating spatial blur in stereoscopic 3D stimuli has shown to reduce cybersickness. In this paper, we develop a technique to incorporate spatial blur in VR systems inspired by the human physiological system. The technique makes use of concepts from foveated imaging and depth-of-field. The developed technique can be applied to any eye tracker equipped VR system as a post-processing step to provide an artifact-free scene. We verify the usefulness of the proposed system by conducting a user study on cybersickness evaluation. We used a custom-built rollercoaster VR environment developed in Unity and an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset to interact with the user. A Simulator Sickness Questionnaire was used to measure the induced sickness while gaze and heart rate data were recorded for quantitative analysis. The experimental analysis highlighted the aptness of our foveated depth-of-field effect in reducing cybersickness in virtual environments by reducing the sickness scores by approximately 66%.

Near-optimal combination of disparity across a log-polar scaled visual field.

The human visual system is foveated: we can see fine spatial details in central vision, whereas resolution is poor in our peripheral visual field, and this loss of resolution follows an approximately logarithmic decrease. Additionally, our brain organizes visual input in polar coordinates. Therefore, the image projection occurring between retina and primary visual cortex can be mathematically described by the log-polar transform. Here, we test and model how this space-variant visual processing affects how we process binocular disparity, a key component of human depth perception. We observe that the fovea preferentially processes disparities at fine spatial scales, whereas the visual periphery is tuned for coarse spatial scales, in line with the naturally occurring distributions of depths and disparities in the real-world. We further show that the visual system integrates disparity information across the visual field, in a near-optimal fashion. We develop a foveated, log-polar model that mimics the processing of depth information in primary visual cortex and that can process disparity directly in the cortical domain representation. This model takes real images as input and recreates the observed topography of human disparity sensitivity. Our findings support the notion that our foveated, binocular visual system has been moulded by the statistics of our visual environment.

A Biologically-Inspired Model to Predict Perceived Visual Speed as a Function of the Stimulated Portion of the Visual Field.

Spatial orientation relies on a representation of the position and orientation of the body relative to the surrounding environment. When navigating in the environment, this representation must be constantly updated taking into account the direction, speed, and amplitude of body motion. Visual information plays an important role in this updating process, notably via optical flow. Here, we systematically investigated how the size and the simulated portion of the field of view (FoV) affect perceived visual speed of human observers. We propose a computational model to account for the patterns of human data. This model is composed of hierarchical cells' layers that model the neural processing stages of the dorsal visual pathway. Specifically, we consider that the activity of the MT area is processed by populations of modeled MST cells that are sensitive to the differential components of the optical flow, thus producing selectivity for specific patterns of optical flow. Our results indicate that the proposed computational model is able to describe the experimental evidence and it could be used to predict expected biases of speed perception for conditions in which only some portions of the visual field are visible.

A Mixed Reality system for the simulation of emergency and first-aid scenarios.

Simulation is a powerful learning tool, as it allows gaining direct experience in a controlled and repeatable way. However, the simulation is effective when it is able to reproduce the real conditions and when the user feels him/herself immersed and present in the situation. With the aim of improving these critical points, we propose an immersive virtual reality system for first-aid handling. Specifically, we increase the visual realism of medical mannequins and the contextualization, and we add the touch feedback by mapping the real mannequin into its virtual representation. Moreover, the interaction is performed by using a virtual representation of the users own hands by allowing a more realistic execution of tasks. The results show a good accuracy in the mapping between the real and the virtual mannequin, and a high degree of presence for both the control group and the medical one. These results and the low values of simulator sickness reported during the experiment are a good starting point for the use of the proposed mixed reality system in simulation scenarios.

A Computational Model for the Neural Representation and Estimation of the Binocular Vector Disparity from Convergent Stereo Image Pairs.

The depth cue is a fundamental piece of information for artificial and living beings who interact with the surrounding environment in order to handle objects and to avoid obstacles: in such situations, the disparity patterns, which arise when agents fixate objects, are vector fields. We propose a biologically-inspired computational model to estimate dense horizontal and vertical disparity maps by exploiting the cortical paradigms of the primate visual system: in particular, we aim to model the disparity sensitivity of the V1-MT visual pathway. The proposed model is based on a first processing stage composed of a bank of spatial band-pass filters and a static nonlinearity, mimicking complex binocular cells. Then, subsequent pooling stages and decoding strategies allow the model to estimate the vector disparity, after having represented it as a population of MT-like units. We assess the proposed model by using standard benchmarking stereo images, the Middlebury dataset, and specific stereo images that have horizontal and vertical disparities, which characterize the stimuli produced by active vision systems. Moreover, we systemically analyze how the different processing stages affect the model performance, and we discuss their implications for the neural modeling.

A dataset of stereoscopic images and ground-truth disparity mimicking human fixations in peripersonal space.

Binocular stereopsis is the ability of a visual system, belonging to a live being or a machine, to interpret the different visual information deriving from two eyes/cameras for depth perception. From this perspective, the ground-truth information about three-dimensional visual space, which is hardly available, is an ideal tool both for evaluating human performance and for benchmarking machine vision algorithms. In the present work, we implemented a rendering methodology in which the camera pose mimics realistic eye pose for a fixating observer, thus including convergent eye geometry and cyclotorsion. The virtual environment we developed relies on highly accurate 3D virtual models, and its full controllability allows us to obtain the stereoscopic pairs together with the ground-truth depth and camera pose information. We thus created a stereoscopic dataset: GENUA PESTO-GENoa hUman Active fixation database: PEripersonal space STereoscopic images and grOund truth disparity. The dataset aims to provide a unified framework useful for a number of problems relevant to human and computer vision, from scene exploration and eye movement studies to 3D scene reconstruction.

A space-variant model for motion interpretation across the visual field.

We implement a neural model for the estimation of the focus of radial motion (FRM) at different retinal locations and assess the model by comparing its results with respect to the precision with which human observers can estimate the FRM in naturalistic motion stimuli. The model describes the deep hierarchy of the first stages of the dorsal visual pathway and is space variant, since it takes into account the retino-cortical transformation of the primate visual system through log-polar mapping. The log-polar transform of the retinal image is the input to the cortical motion-estimation stage, where optic flow is computed by a three-layer neural population. The sensitivity to complex motion patterns that has been found in area MST is modeled through a population of adaptive templates. The first-order description of cortical optic flow is derived from the responses of the adaptive templates. Information about self-motion (e.g., direction of heading) is estimated by combining the first-order descriptors computed in the cortical domain. The model's performance at FRM estimation as a function of retinal eccentricity neatly maps onto data from human observers. By employing equivalent-noise analysis we observe that loss in FRM accuracy for both model and human observers is attributable to a decrease in the efficiency with which motion information is pooled with increasing retinal eccentricity in the visual field. The decrease in sampling efficiency is thus attributable to receptive-field size increases with increasing retinal eccentricity, which are in turn driven by the lossy log-polar mapping that projects the retinal image onto primary visual areas. We further show that the model is able to estimate direction of heading in real-world scenes, thus validating the model's potential application to neuromimetic robotic architectures. More broadly, we provide a framework in which to model complex motion integration across the visual field in real-world scenes.

The (In)Effectiveness of Simulated Blur for Depth Perception in Naturalistic Images.

We examine depth perception in images of real scenes with naturalistic variation in pictorial depth cues, simulated dioptric blur and binocular disparity. Light field photographs of natural scenes were taken with a Lytro plenoptic camera that simultaneously captures images at up to 12 focal planes. When accommodation at any given plane was simulated, the corresponding defocus blur at other depth planes was extracted from the stack of focal plane images. Depth information from pictorial cues, relative blur and stereoscopic disparity was separately introduced into the images. In 2AFC tasks, observers were required to indicate which of two patches extracted from these images was farther. Depth discrimination sensitivity was highest when geometric and stereoscopic disparity cues were both present. Blur cues impaired sensitivity by reducing the contrast of geometric information at high spatial frequencies. While simulated generic blur may not assist depth perception, it remains possible that dioptric blur from the optics of an observer's own eyes may be used to recover depth information on an individual basis. The implications of our findings for virtual reality rendering technology are discussed.

Simulated disparity and peripheral blur interact during binocular fusion.

We have developed a low-cost, practical gaze-contingent display in which natural images are presented to the observer with dioptric blur and stereoscopic disparity that are dependent on the three-dimensional structure of natural scenes. Our system simulates a distribution of retinal blur and depth similar to that experienced in real-world viewing conditions by emmetropic observers. We implemented the system using light-field photographs taken with a plenoptic camera which supports digital refocusing anywhere in the images. We coupled this capability with an eye-tracking system and stereoscopic rendering. With this display, we examine how the time course of binocular fusion depends on depth cues from blur and stereoscopic disparity in naturalistic images. Our results show that disparity and peripheral blur interact to modify eye-movement behavior and facilitate binocular fusion, and the greatest benefit was gained by observers who struggled most to achieve fusion. Even though plenoptic images do not replicate an individual's aberrations, the results demonstrate that a naturalistic distribution of depth-dependent blur may improve 3-D virtual reality, and that interruptions of this pattern (e.g., with intraocular lenses) which flatten the distribution of retinal blur may adversely affect binocular fusion.

An active system for visually-guided reaching in 3D across binocular fixations.

Based on the importance of relative disparity between objects for accurate hand-eye coordination, this paper presents a biological approach inspired by the cortical neural architecture. So, the motor information is coded in egocentric coordinates obtained from the allocentric representation of the space (in terms of disparity) generated from the egocentric representation of the visual information (image coordinates). In that way, the different aspects of the visuomotor coordination are integrated: an active vision system, composed of two vergent cameras; a module for the 2D binocular disparity estimation based on a local estimation of phase differences performed through a bank of Gabor filters; and a robotic actuator to perform the corresponding tasks (visually-guided reaching). The approach's performance is evaluated through experiments on both simulated and real data.

Real-time simulation of large-scale neural architectures for visual features computation based on GPU.

The intrinsic parallelism of visual neural architectures based on distributed hierarchical layers is well suited to be implemented on the multi-core architectures of modern graphics cards. The design strategies that allow us to optimally take advantage of such parallelism, in order to efficiently map on GPU the hierarchy of layers and the canonical neural computations, are proposed. Specifically, the advantages of a cortical map-like representation of the data are exploited. Moreover, a GPU implementation of a novel neural architecture for the computation of binocular disparity from stereo image pairs, based on populations of binocular energy neurons, is presented. The implemented neural model achieves good performances in terms of reliability of the disparity estimates and a near real-time execution speed, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the devised design strategies. The proposed approach is valid in general, since the neural building blocks we implemented are a common basis for the modeling of visual neural functionalities.

A phase-based stereo vision system-on-a-chip.

A simple and fast technique for depth estimation based on phase measurement has been adopted for the implementation of a real-time stereo system with sub-pixel resolution on an FPGA device. The technique avoids the attendant problem of phase warping. The designed system takes full advantage of the inherent processing parallelism and segmentation capabilities of FPGA devices to achieve a computation speed of 65megapixels/s, which can be arranged with a customized frame-grabber module to process 211frames/s at a size of 640x480 pixels. The processing speed achieved is higher than conventional camera frame rates, thus allowing the system to extract multiple estimations and be used as a platform to evaluate integration schemes of a population of neurons without increasing hardware resource demands.

Emergence of oscillations and spatio-temporal coherence states in a continuum-model of excitatory and inhibitory neurons.

A neural field model of the reaction-diffusion type for the emergence of oscillatory phenomena in visual cortices is proposed. To investigate the joint spatio-temporal oscillatory dynamics in a continuous distribution of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the coupling among oscillators is modelled as a diffusion process, combined with non-linear point interactions. The model exhibits cooperative activation properties in both time and space, by reacting to volleys of activations at multiple cortical sites with ordered spatio-temporal oscillatory states, similar to those found in the physiological experiments on slow-wave field potentials. The possible use of the resulting spatial distributions of coherent states, as a flexible medium to establish feature association, is discussed.

Centric-minded templates for self-motion perception.

We propose a two-layer neuromorphic architecture by which motion field pattern, generated during locomotion, are processed by template detectors specialized for gaze-directed self-motion (expansion and rotation). The templates provide a gaze-centered computation for analyzing motion field in terms of how it is related to the fixation point (i.e., the fovea). The analysis is performed by relating the vectorial components of the act of motion to variations (i.e., asymmetries) of the local structure of the motion field. Notwithstanding their limited extension in space, such centric-minded templates extract, as a whole, global information from the input flow field, being sensitive to different local instances of the same global property of the vector field with respect to the fixation point; a quantitative analysis, in terms of vectorial operators, evidences this property as tuning curves for heading direction. Model performances, evaluated in several situations characterized by conditions of absence and presence of pursuit eye movements, validate the approach. We observe that the gaze-centered model provides an explicit testable hypothesis that can guide further explorations of visual motion processing in extrastriate cortical areas.