Perception-guided global illumination solution for animation rendering

We present a method for efficient global illumination computation in dynamic environments by taking advantage of temporal coherence of lighting distribution. The method is embedded in the framework of stochastic photon tracing and density estimation techniques. A locally operating energy-based error metric is used to prevent photon processing in the temporal domain for the scene regions in which lighting distribution changes rapidly. A perception-based error metric suitable for animation is used to keep noise inherent in stochastic methods below the sensitivity level of the human observer. As a result a perceptually-consistent quality across all animation frames is obtained. Furthermore, the computation cost is reduced compared to the traditional approaches operating solely in the spatial domain.