Stealth Updates of Visual Information by Leveraging Change Blindness and Computational Visual Morphing

Abstract

We present an approach for covert visual updates by leveraging change blindness with computationally generated morphed images. To clarify the design parameters for intentionally suppressing change detection with morphing visuals, we investigated the visual change detection in three temporal behaviors: visual blank, eye-blink, and step-sequential changes. The results showed a robust trend of change blindness with a blank of more than 33.3 ms and with eye blink. Our sequential change study revealed that participants did not recognize changes until an average of 57% morphing toward another face in small change steps. In addition, changes went unnoticed until the end of morphing in more than 10% of all trials. Our findings should contribute to the design of covert visual updates without consuming users’ attention by leveraging change blindness with computational visual morphing.