Real-time simulation of accommodation and low-order aberrations of the human eye using light-gathering trees

Alex R. Cunha Lima, Arthur M. Medeiros, Vitor G. Marques, Manuel M. Oliveira

Abstract: We present a real-time technique for simulating accommodation and low-order aberrations (e.g., myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism) of the human eye. Our approach models the corresponding point spread function, producing realistic depth-dependent simulations. Real-time performance is achieved with the use of a novel light-gathering tree data structure, which allows us to approximate the contributions of over 300 samples per pixel under 6 ms per frame. For comparison, with the same time budget, an optimized ray tracer exploring specialized hardware acceleration traces two samples per pixel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments on images with depth from real environments. Our results achieved SSIM values ranging from 0.94 to 0.99 and PSNR ranging from 32.4 to 43.0 in objective evaluations, indicating good agreement with the ground truth.