Premium
Interactive Global Photon Mapping
Author(s) -
Fabianowski B.,
Dingliana J.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01492.x
Subject(s) - global illumination , computer science , parallelizable manifold , frame rate , cuda , computer graphics (images) , kernel (algebra) , ray tracing (physics) , frame (networking) , process (computing) , computer vision , artificial intelligence , computational science , algorithm , parallel computing , optics , rendering (computer graphics) , physics , mathematics , telecommunications , combinatorics , operating system
Abstract We present a photon mapping technique capable of computing high quality global illumination at interactive frame rates. By extending the concept of photon differentials to efficiently handle diffuse reflections, we generate footprints at all photon hit points. These enable illumination reconstruction by density estimation with variable kernel bandwidths without having to locate the k nearest photon hits first. Adapting an efficient BVH construction process for ray tracing acceleration, we build photon maps that enable the fast retrieval of all hits relevant to a shading point. We present a heuristic that automatically tunes the BVH build's termination criterion to the scene and illumination conditions. As all stages of the algorithm are highly parallelizable, we demonstrate an implementation using NVidia's CUDA manycore architecture running at interactive rates on a single GPU. Both light source and camera may be freely moved with global illumination fully recalculated in each frame.