CompoundRay, an open-source tool for high-speed and high-fidelity rendering of compound eyes
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Abstract
Revealing the functioning of compound eyes is of interest to biologists and engineers alike who wish to understand how visually complex behaviours (e.g. detection, tracking, navigation) arise in nature, and to abstract concepts to develop novel artificial sensory systems. A key investigative method is to replicate the sensory apparatus using artificial systems, allowing for investigation of the visual information that drives animal behaviour when exposed to environmental cues. To date, 'Compound Eye Models' (CEMs) have largely explored features such field of view and angular resolution, but the role of shape and overall structure have been largely overlooked due to modelling complexity. Modern real-time raytracing technologies are enabling the construction of a new generation of computationally fast, high-fidelity CEMs. This work introduces a new open-source CEM software (CompoundRay) that is capable of accurately rendering the visual perspective of bees (6,000 individual ommatidia arranged on two realistic eye surfaces) at over 3,000 frames per second. We show how the speed and accuracy facilitated by this software can be used to investigate pressing research questions (e.g. how low resolutions compound eyes can localise small objects) using modern methods (e.g. ML information exploration).
Data availability
The manuscript is a computational study, with all modelling code and data accessible on GitHub at https://github.com/ManganLab/eye-rendererUse of the natural environment was kindly provided by Dr. JoeWoodgate, Queen Mary University of London and is subject to upcoming publication. As such, instead included in the CompoundRay repository is a stand-in natural 3D terrain model. As all models are used for demonstrative purpose, this stand-in model offers little difference to the natural model used, bar it's subjectively lower-quality aesthetics.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P006094/1)
- Blayze Millward
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/S030964/1)
- Michael Mangan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Millward et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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CompoundRay, an open-source tool for high-speed and high-fidelity rendering of compound eyes
eLife 11:e73893.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73893
