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Ray tracing via GPU rasterization

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Abstract

Ray tracing is a dominant method for generating a wide variety of global illumination effects, such as reflections/refractions, shadows, etc. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to perform nearly accurate ray tracing using the programmable graphics processor units (GPUs). With the aid of the linked-list A-buffer and the uniform voxel grid to represent scene geometry, the ray-scene intersection can be efficiently computed via the built-in rasterization on GPUs. Based on this novel ray-scene intersection technique, a new ray-tracing framework which supports various light transport algorithms is introduced, including Ray Casting, Whitted Ray tracing, Ambient Occlusion, Path Tracing, and so on. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We thank Zhao Dong for his valuable suggestions. This work was supported jointly by Nation Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 61003132) and 973 Program of China (No. 2011CB706900).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing , 100029, China

    Wei Hu, Yangyu Huang, Fan Zhang & Wei Li

  2. Computer School, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing , 100010, China

    Guodong Yuan

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  1. Wei Hu
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  2. Yangyu Huang
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  3. Fan Zhang
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  4. Guodong Yuan
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  5. Wei Li
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Correspondence to Wei Hu.

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Hu, W., Huang, Y., Zhang, F. et al. Ray tracing via GPU rasterization. Vis Comput 30, 697–706 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-014-0968-8

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