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Photon mapping is a widely used technique for global illumination rendering. In the density estimation step of photon mapping, the indirect radiance at a shading point is estimated through a filtering process using nearby stored photons; an isotropic filtering kernel is usually used. However, using an isotropic kernel is not always the optimal choice, especially for cases when eye paths intersect with surfaces with anisotropic BRDFs. In this paper, we propose an anisotropic filtering kernel for density estimation to handle such anisotropic eye paths. The anisotropic filtering kernel is derived from the recently introduced anisotropic spherical Gaussian representation of BRDFs. Compared to conventional photon mapping, our method is able to reduce rendering errors with negligible additional cost when rendering scenes containing anisotropic BRDFs.


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Anisotropic density estimation for photon mapping

Show Author's information Fu-Jun Luan1Li-Fan Wu1Kun Xu1( )
TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Abstract

Photon mapping is a widely used technique for global illumination rendering. In the density estimation step of photon mapping, the indirect radiance at a shading point is estimated through a filtering process using nearby stored photons; an isotropic filtering kernel is usually used. However, using an isotropic kernel is not always the optimal choice, especially for cases when eye paths intersect with surfaces with anisotropic BRDFs. In this paper, we propose an anisotropic filtering kernel for density estimation to handle such anisotropic eye paths. The anisotropic filtering kernel is derived from the recently introduced anisotropic spherical Gaussian representation of BRDFs. Compared to conventional photon mapping, our method is able to reduce rendering errors with negligible additional cost when rendering scenes containing anisotropic BRDFs.

Keywords: photon mapping, density estimation, anisotropic, anisotropic spherical Gaussian

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Publication history

Revised: 21 November 2014
Accepted: 04 March 2015
Published: 14 August 2015
Issue date: September 2015

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© The authors 2015

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the National High-tech R&D Program of China (No. 2012AA011802) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61170153).

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