Exploiting Change Blindness to Reduce Bitrate and Display Luminance in Video Streaming

This paper investigates the potential of exploiting change blindness (CB), a perceptual phenomenon where changes in a visual stimulus are not noticed by the observer, to enhance rendering efficiency and achieve higher compression gains in video encoding. We explore various distortion techniques, including foveation, cropping, and dimming, to introduce changes that can be noticed but typically are not, due to the limited bandwidth of our perceptual experience. Through a user study involving HEVC-encoded videos and a task designed to direct gaze, we assess the impact of these distortions on perceived video quality, bitrate reduction, and display luminance. Our findings suggest that significant bitrate and luminance reductions can be achieved without adversely affecting perceived quality, highlighting CB’s potential for reducing energy consumption and strain on streaming infrastructure. Despite observer variability and the ephemeral nature of CB, our results demonstrate that conscious attention plays a crucial role in the perception of video quality and that exploiting CB can lead to substantial efficiency gains in video coding.