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Path Graphs: Iterative Path Space Filtering

delete2021-12-10
delete7
PRE
AI
X
Xi Deng *
M
Miloš Hašan
N
Nathan Carr
S
Steve Marschner
DOI:10.1145/3478513.3480547delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
To render higher quality images from the samples generated by path tracing with a low sample count, we propose a novel path reuse approach that processes a fixed collection of paths to iteratively refine and improve radiance estimates throughout the scene. Our method operates on a path graph consisting of the union of the traced paths with additional neighbor edges inserted among clustered nearby vertices. Our approach refines the initial noisy radiance estimates via an aggregation operator, treating vertices within clusters as independent sampling techniques that can be combined using MIS. In a novel step, we also introduce a propagation operator to forward the refined estimates along the paths to successive bounces. We apply the aggregation and propagation operations to the graph iteratively, progressively refining the radiance values, converging to fixed-point radiance estimates with lower variance than the original ones. We also introduce a decorrelation (final gather) step, which uses information already in the graph and is cheap to compute, allowing us to combine the method with standard denoisers. Our approach is lightweight, in the sense that it can be easily plugged into any standard path tracer and neural final image denoiser. Furthermore, it is independent of scene complexity, as the graph size only depends on image resolution and average path depth. We demonstrate that our technique leads to realistic rendering results starting from as low as 1 path per pixel, even in complex indoor scenes dominated by multi-bounce indirect illumination.
Keywords:
ray tracing
global illumination
Monte Carlo
path graph
path space filtering

Journal

ACM Transactions on Graphics cover
ACM Transactions on Graphics
IF:
9.5
Papers:
4.7K
Citations:
3.6W

Organization

A
adobe systems inc.
Scholars:
273
Papers: 305
Citations: 0
C
Cornell University
Scholars:
6.3W
Papers: 5.4W
Citations: 10.9W