Spatons: Spatiotonally Localized Building Blocks for Efficient XR Predistortion

Mohammadjavad Maheronnaghsh, Sushant Kondguli, Steve Mann, Andreas Moshovos

We present Spatons, a family of compositional, spatially localized neural operators for computationally efficient XR (extended reality) predistortion and distortion compensation. XR displays (AR, VR, and MR) suffer from spatial (e.g., geometric) and tonal (e.g., colour) distortions. Frames can be pre-distorted so that the projected image looks as intended. Distortions vary with manufacturing tolerances and projection systems, motivating programmable compensation. Untethered, battery-operated XR systems also require low energy and latency. A Spaton is a hybrid patch-to-pixel block combining tiny Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with fixed-function interpolation. Using Spatons, we build programmable, computationally efficient pipelines for varied distortion scenarios. On the full spatiotonal Scenario 5, Sequential-5' matches CompenNet++ in SSIM (0.944 vs. 0.944) and closely matches its PSNR (27.5 vs. 27.7 dB), with substantially lower complexity. We demonstrate a flexible Spaton solution with 6 times fewer FLOPs and 106 times fewer parameters than CompenNet++, and 4-10 times fewer memory transfers than UNet++. We characterize software implementations and analytical hardware…