Visual comparability of 3D regular sampling and reconstruction

The Body-Centered Cubic (BCC) and Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattices have been analytically shown to be more efficient sampling lattices than the traditional Cartesian Cubic (CC) lattice, but there has been no estimate of their visual comparability. Two perceptual studies (each with N = 12 participants) compared the visual quality of images rendered from BCC and FCC lattices to images rendered from the CC lattice. Images were generated from two signals: the commonly used Marschner-Lobb synthetic function and a computed tomography scan of a fish tail. Observers found that BCC and FCC could produce images of comparable visual quality to CC, using 30-35 percent fewer samples. For the images used in our studies, the L(2) error metric shows high correlation with the judgement of human observers. Using the L(2) metric as a proxy, the results of the experiments appear to extend across a wide range of images and parameter choices.