Ray Maps for Global Illumination

Vlastimil Havran, Jiří Bittner, Robert Herzog, Hans-Peter Seidel
Ray Maps for Global Illumination
In Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, pages 43-54. 2005.
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Abstract

We describe a novel data structure for representing light transport called ray map. The ray map extends the concept of photon maps: it stores not only photon impacts but the whole photon paths. We demonstrate the utility of ray maps for global illumination by eliminating boundary bias and reducing topological bias of density estimation in global illumination. Thanks to the elimination of boundary bias we could use ray maps for fast direct visualization with the image quality being close to that obtained by the expensive nal gathering step. We describe in detail our implementation of the ray map using a lazily constructed kD-tree. We also present several optimizations bringing the ray map query performance close to the performance of the photon map.

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@inproceedings{havran-2005-egsr,
  title =      "Ray Maps for Global Illumination",
  author =     "Vlastimil Havran and Ji{\v r}{\' i} Bittner and Robert
               Herzog and Hans-Peter Seidel",
  year =       "2005",
  abstract =   "We describe a novel data structure for representing light
               transport called ray map. The ray map extends the concept of
               photon maps: it stores not only photon impacts but the whole
               photon paths. We demonstrate the utility of ray maps for
               global illumination by eliminating boundary bias and
               reducing topological bias of density estimation in global
               illumination. Thanks to the elimination of boundary bias we
               could use ray maps for fast direct visualization with the
               image quality being close to that obtained by the expensive
               nal gathering step. We describe in detail our
               implementation of the ray map using a lazily constructed
               kD-tree. We also present several optimizations bringing the
               ray map query performance close to the performance of the
               photon map.",
  pages =      "43--54",
  booktitle =  "Eurographics Symposium on Rendering",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2005/havran-2005-egsr/",
}