A real-time color quantization scheme for virtual environments navigation system

Abstract

A navigation system for virtual environments using low-quality HMD(head mounted display) must quantize images when the system presents true-color image with restricted number of colors. Such navigation system quantizes an image by using fixed palette. If the system represents an image by using a variable palette which is made considering a region around the viewpoint then user can perceive a virtual environments more vividly because human visual system is sensitive to the colors variation in the region around the viewpoint. In this paper we propose a color quantization algorithm that quantize a region around the viewpoint more finely than other regions at each variation of viewpoint for virtual environments navigation system and compose virtual environments navigation system using proposed algorithm. The system quantizes an image at each variation of viewpoint and shows a quantized image to user through HMD. We tested user preferences for our proposed system and the results show that users preferred our system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.