Minimizing the number of support points in perceptual offline haptic compression

Abstract

During the recording of a haptic interaction session both position and force-feedback data have to be saved. This work proposes two novel methods for haptic data compression which allow to keep the reconstruction errors during playback below human perception thresholds. Supported by well-known results from psychophysics, the first proposed non-iterative method determines the least amount of samples necessary to reconstruct the force-feedback signal within the perception thresholds. The second proposed method compresses the position signal in open-loop fashion exploiting the fact that for the replay of haptic interaction sessions the position signal no longer has influence on the force-feedback. Thus, the only position information perceived by the user is the displayed visual information and therefore it can be compressed exploiting the limits of human visual perception. Our experimental results show better haptic signal compression performance when compared to the state-of-the-art for both methods while maintaining good haptic and visual subjective experiences.