title: Humans perceive flicker artifacts at 500 Hz.
abstract: Humans perceive a stable average intensity image without flicker artifacts when a television or monitor updates at a sufficiently fast rate. This rate, known as the critical flicker fusion rate, has been studied for both spatially uniform lights, and spatio-temporal displays. These studies have included both stabilized and unstablized retinal images, and report the maximum observable rate as 50-90 Hz. A separate line of research has reported that fast eye movements known as saccades allow simple modulated LEDs to be observed at very high rates. Here we show that humans perceive visual flicker artifacts at rates over 500 Hz when a display includes high frequency spatial edges. This rate is many times higher than previously reported. As a result, modern display designs which use complex spatio-temporal coding need to update much faster than conventional TVs, which traditionally presented a simple sequence of natural images.
authors: Computer Science Department, University of California Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95033, USA.
authors: James
authors: J
authors: Davis
authors: Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 2317 Speedway, Stop D9500 Austin, TX 78712, USA.
authors: Yi-Hsuan
authors: YH
authors: Hsieh
authors: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan(R.O.C).
authors: Hung-Chi
authors: HC
authors: Lee
mesh_terms: D016477:Artifacts; D005133:Eye Movements; D005425:Flicker Fusion / Q000502:physiology* / Q000528:radiation effects; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D065855:Spatial Processing; D013690:Television
references: Vision Res. 1971 Mar;11(3):261-73
references: 5579841
references: J Opt Soc Am. 1974 Jul;64(7):983-90
references: 4841935
references: J Opt Soc Am. 1979 Oct;69(10):1340-9
references: 521853
references: Vision Res. 2005 Feb;45(4):413-30
references: 15610747
references: Med Phys. 2013 Sep;40(9):092701
references: 24007183
references: Biol Cybern. 1986;54(6):351-8
references: 3756240
references: J Opt Soc Am A. 1984 May;1(5):474-81
references: 6726494
references: PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e44048
references: 22984458
references: Vision Res. 2001 Dec;41(28):3909-16
references: 11738456
references: J Soc Inf Disp. 2011 Mar 1;19(3):271-297
references: 21572544