Emulating Displays with Continuously Varying Frame Rates, SIGGRAPH 2016

Emulating Displays with Continuously Varying Frame Rates

Krzysztof Templin¹     Piotr Didyk^{2, 1}     Karol Myszkowski¹     Hans-Peter Seidel<sup>1    

1</sup> MPI Informatik    ² Saarland University, MMCI

Using different presentation frame rates yields different looks of the motion picture: higher rates reduce visibility of artifacts such as strobing and judder, whereas lower rates contribute to the “cinematic look” of the film. We introduce a technique that enables emulating the look of any presentation frame rate up to the display system frame rate. The frame rate in the content processed with our method can vary continuously, in both the spatial and the temporal dimensions.

Deer sequence (CC) Jeffrey Beach.

Abstract

The visual quality of a motion picture is significantly influenced by the choice of the presentation frame rate. Increasing the frame rate improves the clarity of the image and helps to alleviate many artifacts, such as blur, strobing, flicker, or judder. These benefits, however, come at the price of losing well-established film aesthetics, often referred to as the “cinematic look”. Current technology leaves artists with a sparse set of choices, e.g., 24 Hz or 48 Hz, limiting the freedom in adjusting the frame rate to artistic needs, content, and display technology. In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a novel filtering technique which enables emulating the whole spectrum of presentation frame rates on a single-frame-rate display. The key component of our technique is a set of simple yet powerful filters calibrated and evaluated in psychophysical experiments. By varying their parameters we can achieve an impression of continuously varying presentation frame rate in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. This allows artists to achieve the best balance between the aesthetics and the objective quality of the motion picture. Furthermore, we show how our technique, informed by cinematic guidelines, can adapt to the content and achieve this balance automatically.

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© 2016 The Authors. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics 35(4) (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2897824.2925879

Citation

Krzysztof Templin, Piotr Didyk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel
Emulating Displays with Continuously Varying Frame Rates
To appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics 35(4) (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2016, Anaheim, CA)

@article{Templin2016,
  author = { 
	Krzysztof Templin and
	Piotr Didyk and 
	Karol Myszkowski and 
	Hans-Peter Seidel},
  title = {Emulating Displays with Continuously Varying Frame Rates},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH)},
  year = {2016},
  volume = {35},
  number = {4},
  note = {To appear}
}

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Stefan Grandinetti from Hochschule der Medien (Stuttgart) and Harald Brendel from ARRI Cine Technik (Munich) for providing us with the Biker video sequence.