Exploiting entropy masking in perceptual graphic rendering

•We proposed a new formulation of entropy masking in images.•The method can well differentiate unstructured regions from structured ones.•We proposed a perceptual rendering scheme by exploiting entropy masking.•Computational costs of rendering decrease significantly.•Perceived quality of rendered images does not decrease.

Since the human visual system (HVS) is the ultimate appreciator of most photorealistically rendered images, rendering process can be accelerated by exploiting the properties of the HVS. According to the concept of entropy masking, the HVS is not sensitive to visual distortions in unstructured visual signals. For structured regions, pixels are highly correlated, while the similarity among pixels in unstructured regions is low. In this paper, we detect unstructured regions by extracting local patches from each pixel and its neighboring pixels, and comparing the similarity between the local patches of the center pixel and the neighboring pixels. We further exploit entropy masking in perceptual rendering, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accelerate rendering, without degrading the perceived quality of resultant images.