Real-time temporal quality compensation technique for head mounted displays

An asynchronous time warp (ATW) is used to reduce a motion-to-photon latency in head mounted displays (HMDs). To implement the ATW, a graphics processing unit (GPU) must allow to perform the time warp during the image rendering. However, typical GPUs do not support the preemption optimized for the ATW. Even though the preemption is performed in the GPUs, visual artifcat like a judder can occur. Therefore, high priced GPUs with high performance optimized for the ATW must be used to enhance the temporal image quality. In this paper, a new field-prgrammable gate array (FPGA) based HMD system is proposed to perform the temporal quality compensation without using ATW. The proposed system can enhance the perceived image quality in the HMD even when using the typical GPUs with low performance. We develop the hardware system on the low priced FPGA handling output images with the 1440X2560 pixel resolution. Experimental results show that the average PSNR of our system is 30.15dB for the temporal image quality and the total execution time of this system is 1.48 ms. Thus, our system can be implmented in real-time with the improved temproal image quality.