Visibility sweeps for joint-hierarchical importance sampling of direct lighting for stochastic volume rendering

Visibility sweeps for joint-hierarchical importance sampling of direct lighting for stochastic volume rendering

Kroes, T.
Eisemann, M.
Eisemann, E.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Intelligent Systems

2015-12-31

Physically-based light transport in heterogeneous volumetric data is computationally expensive because the rendering integral (particularly visibility) has to be stochastically solved. We present a visibility estimation method in concert with an importance-sampling technique for efficient and unbiased stochastic volume rendering. Our solution relies on a joint strategy, which involves the environmental illumination and visibility inside of the volume. A major contribution of our method is a fast sweeping-plane algorithm to progressively estimate partial occlusions at discrete locations, where we store the result using an octahedral representation. We then rely on a quadtree-based hierarchy to perform a joint importance sampling. Our technique is unbiased, requires little precomputation, is highly parallelizable, and is applicable to a various volume data sets, dynamic transfer functions, and changing environmental lighting.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:67e72f05-8c31-448b-95d1-bbce9cee4264

ACM

978-0-9947868-0-7

GI '15; Proceedings of the 41st Graphics Interface Conference, Halifax (USA), 3-5 June, 2015; Authors version

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2015 The Authors