Analyzing human perception of procedural 3D terrains through perceptual texture features

Sammanfattning

Terrains are a fundamental element of three-dimensional (3D) scenes and are increasingly generated algorithmically through procedural methods. However, how users perceive these procedurally generated terrains remains largely underexplored. While human perception of digital textures has been extensively studied since the 1960s, the perception of 3D terrains, despite their connection to 2D height maps, has received far less attention. This study investigates whether established metrics for analyzing human perception of 2D textures, such as contrast, repetitive and granular, can be applied in the context of analyzing human perception of procedurally generated 3D terrains. Using six procedural terrain generation models to produce both 2D and 3D stimuli, two psychophysical experiments were constructed: a free grouping experiment where participants grouped 2D and 3D stimuli respectively based on visual similarity, and a rating experiment where participants rated individual stimuli on a scale of 1-9 for each perceptual feature. A total of 15 participants completed the experiments. Results revealed that similar trends appeared for both 2D and 3D stimuli in both experiments, indicating similarities between how 2D and 3D stimuli were perceived. Further, results also indicated that existing perceptual metrics accommodate the analysis of human perception of procedurally generated 3D terrains well through each model having a discernible feature vector, meaning that no models were given enough similar ratings by participants, based on the investigated perceptual features, such that they could not be discerned by ratings data alone.