Reconstructing the Indirect Light Field for Global Illumination

Jaakko Lehtinen1,* Timo Aila1,* Samuli Laine1 Frédo Durand2

1NVIDIA Research 2MIT CSAIL *Equal contributors

ACM Trans. Graph. 31(4) (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2012)

Abstract

Stochastic techniques for rendering indirect illumination suffer from noise due to the variance in the integrand. In this paper, we describe a general reconstruction technique that exploits anisotropy in the light field and permits efficient reuse of input samples between pixels or world-space locations, multiplying the effective sampling rate by a large factor. Our technique introduces visibility-aware anisotropic reconstruction to indirect illumination, ambient occlusion and glossy reflections. It operates on point samples without knowledge of the scene, and can thus be seen as an advanced image filter. Our results show dramatic improvement in image quality while using very sparse input samplings.

Acknowledgments

We thank Guillermo Lleal Laguna for the San Miguel scene. Fredo Durand is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Errata

Towards the end of Section 2.3.2: the text should read "If the intersection point lies within the positive or negative halfspaces of both samples, a conflict is declared, cf. Figure 5."

Section 3.1: the time to render 8spp with PBRT should be 62.7s instead of 36.6s, and consequently the speedup of our method should be 15.5x instead of 18x.

Code

github

Downloads

Preprint (PDF, 27M)

Video coming.


Last modified: Mon Sep 17 11:00:49 EDT 2012