Ultrawide foveated video extrapolation

Consider the task of creating a very wide visual extrapolation, i.e., a synthetic continuation of the field of view much beyond the acquired data. Existing related methods deal mainly with filling in holes in images and video. These methods are very time consuming and often prone to noticeable artifacts. The probability for artifacts grows as the synthesized regions become more distant from the domain of the raw video. Therefore, such methods do not lend themselves easily to very large extrapolations. We suggest an approach to enable this task. First, an improved completion algorithm that rejects peripheral distractions significantly reduces attention-drawing artifacts. Second, a foveated video extrapolation approach exploits weaknesses of the human visual system, in order to enable efficient extrapolation of video, while further reducing attention-drawing artifacts. Consider a screen showing the raw video. Let the region beyond the raw video domain reside outside the field corresponding to the viewer's fovea. Then, the farther the extrapolated synthetic region is from the raw field of view, the more the spatial resolution can be reduced. This enables image synthesis using spatial blocks that become gradually coarser and significantly fewer (per unit area), as the extrapolated region expands. The substantial reduction in the number of synthesized blocks notably speeds the process and increases the probability of success without distracting artifacts. Furthermore, results supporting the foveated approach are obtained by a user study.