A perceptually-motivated deadband compression approach for cutaneous haptic feedback

Data compression techniques enable the transmission of highly informative data using little bandwidth. Examples of popular compression formats are Google's VP9 and MPEG's MP3 for video and audio data, respectively. Recently, researchers focused on the applicability of compression techniques for haptic data too. One of these approaches, called the deadband compression approach, transmits new haptic stimuli to the receiver side only when the user is able to actually perceive the change of the stimulus with respect to the previously transmitted one. However, no deadband compression approach has been presented and evaluated for cutaneous stimuli. In this work we extend the deadband approach to cutaneous haptic data. A force-controlled cutaneous device provides the human operator with cutaneous feedback from a virtual environment. A new cutaneous stimulus is applied at the master side only if the human operator is able to sense the change with respect to the previous one. This perceptual threshold is the just notifiable difference (JND). Results show an average bit rate reduction of 61.7% with no performance degradation.