Abstract
Direct illumination rendering is an important technique in computer graphics. Precomputed radiance transfer algorithms can provide high quality rendering results in real time, but they can only support rigid models. On the other hand, ray tracing algorithms are flexible and can gracefully handle animated models. With NVIDIA RTX and the AI denoiser, we can use ray tracing algorithms to render visually appealing results in real time. Visually appealing though, they can deviate from the actual one considerably. We propose a visibility-boundary edge oriented infinite triangle bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal algorithm to dynamically generate visibility in vector form. Our algorithm utilizes the properties of visibility-boundary edges and infinite triangle BVH traversal to maximize the efficiency of the vector form visibility generation. A novel data structure, temporal vectorized visibility, is proposed, which allows visibility in vector form to be shared across time and further increases the generation efficiency. Our algorithm can efficiently render close-to-reference direct illumination results. With the similar processing time, it provides a visual quality improvement around 10 dB in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) w.r.t. the ray tracing algorithm reservoir-based spatiotemporal importance resampling (ReSTIR).
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This work was partially supported by the Innovation and Technology Fund from the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Fund Number ITS/065/21).
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Zhenni Wang received her B.S. degree from Hunan University, in 2017, and her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from City University of Hong Kong, in 2022, respectively. Her research interest is computer graphics.
Tze Yui Ho received his B.Sci. degree in mathematics from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in 2002, his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from City University of Hong Kong, in 2007 and 2010, respectively. His research focuses on pre-computed radiance transfer (PRT) and GPU programming for realistic rendering.
Yi Xiao received his bachelor degree and master degree in mathematics from Sichuan University in 2005 and 2008 respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from City University of Hong Kong in 2012. He is currently a professor in School of Design, Hunan University, China. His research interests include computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning.
Chi Sing Leung received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995. He is currently a professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong. He has authored over 120 journal papers in the of digital signal processing, neural networks, and computer graphics. His current research interests include neural computing and computer graphics. Prof. Leung was a member of the Organizing Committee of ICONIP2006. He received the 2005 IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award for his paper titled “The Plenoptic Illumination Function” in 2005. He was the Program Chair of ICONIP2009 and ICONIP2012, and the General Chair of ICONIP2020. He is/was the guest/associate editor of several journals, including Neural Computing and Applications, Neurocomputing, Neural Processing Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. He is a Governing Board Member of the Asian Pacific Neural Network Society (APNNS).
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Wang, Z., Ho, T.Y., Xiao, Y. et al. Temporal vectorized visibility for direct illumination of animated models. Comp. Visual Media (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-023-0339-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-023-0339-3