Efficient Stereo-Aware Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion with Adaptive Computation

Screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) has become a widely used technique in real-time rendering, valued for its high performance and full support for dynamic geometry. However, applying SSAO directly to stereo rendering can result in incorrect depth perception and viewer discomfort due to differences in captured scene approximations between the left and right views. Existing methods for generating stereo-consistent SSAO often involve substantial computational costs. This paper introduces an adaptive method, inspired by Weber's law, to enhance the efficiency of achieving stereo-consistent SSAO. Our method identifies inconsistent pixels generated by cost-effective SSAO algorithms, such as monoscopic SSAO, and selectively applies computationally intensive stereo-aware computations only to those pixels. Experiments demonstrate that our method delivers stereo-consistent results comparable to state-of-the-art techniques while significantly enhancing rendering performance.