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Irradiance regression for efficient final gathering in global illumination

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Abstract

Photon mapping is widely used for global illumination rendering because of its high computational efficiency. But its efficiency is still limited mainly by the intensive sampling required in final gathering a process that is critical for removing low frequency artifacts of density estimation. In this paper we propose a method to predict the final gathering estimation with direct density estimation thereby achieving high quality global illumination by photon mapping with high efficiency. We first sample the irradiance of a subset of shading points by both final gathering and direct radiance estimation. Then we use the samples as a training set to predict the final gathered irradiance of other shading points through regression. Consequently we are able to achieve about three times overall speedup compared with straightforward final gathering in global illumination computation with the same rendering quality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Computer Aided Design and Computer Graphics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Xuezhen Huang, Zhong Ren & Kun Zhou

  2. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, 100029, China

    Xin Sun, Xin Tong & Baining Guo

Authors
  1. Xuezhen Huang
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  2. Xin Sun
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  3. Zhong Ren
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  4. Xin Tong
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  5. Baining Guo
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  6. Kun Zhou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhong Ren.

Additional information

Xuezhen Huang received his BS in computer science from Ningbo University, China, in 2008. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in the Graphics and Parallel Systems Laboratory, Zhejiang University, China. His research interests include GPGPU applications and photorealistic rendering.

Xin Sun received BS and PhD in computer science from Zhejiang University, China, in 2002 and 2008, respectively. He subsequently joined the Internet Graphics Group of Microsoft Research Asia as an associate researcher. His research interests include realtime global illumination rendering and GPU-based photorealistic rendering.

Zhong Ren received his BS in information engineering, his MS in mechanical engineering, and his PhD in computer science in 2000, 2003, and 2007, respectively, all from Zhejiang University, China. Currently, he is an associate professor of Zhejiang University, and a member of the State Key Lab of CAD&CG. Before returning to Zhejiang University in 2010, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia for three years, where he was an associate researcher in the Internet Graphics group. His research interests include real-time rendering of soft shadows and participating media, spherical harmonics for real-time rendering, and also GPU-based photorealistic rendering.

Xin Tong received his PhD degree from Tsinghua University and then joined Microsoft Research Asia in 1999. He is a principal researcher in Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include appearance modeling and rendering, texture synthesis, and performance capturing. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Baining Guo received his BS degree in mathematics from Peking University and his MS degree in computer science and his PhD degree in applied mathematics from Cornell University. He is an assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, where he also serves as the head of the graphics laboratory. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was a senior staff researcher with the Microcomputer Research Labs of Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California. His research interests include computer graphics and visualization, in the areas of texture and reflectance modeling, texture mapping, translucent surface appearance, real-time rendering, and geometry modeling.

Kun Zhou received his BS and PhD degrees in computer science from Zhejiang University, in 1997 and 2002, respectively. Currently, he is a Cheung Kong distinguished professor in the Computer Science Department of Zhejiang University, and a member of the State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG. Before joining Zhejiang University, he was a lead researcher of the graphics group at Microsoft Research Asia. His research interests include shape modeling/editing, texture mapping/synthesis, real-time rendering, and GPU parallel computing.

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Huang, X., Sun, X., Ren, Z. et al. Irradiance regression for efficient final gathering in global illumination. Front. Comput. Sci. 9, 456–465 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-4211-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-4211-6

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