High-Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion using Temporal Coherence

Information

• Publication Type: Journal Paper (without talk)
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • General Purpose Visibility
• Date: December 2010
• ISSN: 0167-7055
• Journal: Computer Graphics Forum
• Number: 8
• Volume: 29
• Pages: 2492 – 2503
• Keywords: temporal coherence, ambient occlusion, real-time rendering

Abstract

Ambient occlusion is a cheap but effective approximation of global illumination. Recently, screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) methods, which sample the frame buffer as a discretization of the scene geometry, have become very popular for real-time rendering. We present temporal SSAO (TSSAO), a new algorithm which exploits temporal coherence to produce high-quality ambient occlusion in real time. Compared to conventional SSAO, our method reduces both noise as well as blurring artifacts due to strong spatial filtering, faithfully representing fine-grained geometric structures. Our algorithm caches and reuses previously computed SSAO samples, and adaptively applies more samples and spatial filtering only in regions that do not yet have enough information available from previous frames. The method works well for both static and dynamic scenes.

Additional Files and Images

Weblinks

• http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01784.x/abstract

BibTeX

@article{mattausch-2010-tao,
  title =      "High-Quality Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion using Temporal
               Coherence",
  author =     "Oliver Mattausch and Daniel Scherzer and Michael Wimmer",
  year =       "2010",
  abstract =   "Ambient occlusion is a cheap but effective approximation of
               global illumination. Recently, screen-space ambient
               occlusion (SSAO) methods, which sample the frame buffer as a
               discretization of the scene geometry, have become very
               popular for real-time rendering. We present temporal SSAO
               (TSSAO), a new algorithm which exploits temporal coherence
               to produce high-quality ambient occlusion in real time.
               Compared to conventional SSAO, our method reduces both noise
               as well as blurring artifacts due to strong spatial
               filtering, faithfully representing fine-grained geometric
               structures. Our algorithm caches and reuses previously
               computed SSAO samples, and adaptively applies more samples
               and spatial filtering only in regions that do not yet have
               enough information available from previous frames. The
               method works well for both static and dynamic scenes.",
  month =      dec,
  issn =       "0167-7055",
  journal =    "Computer Graphics Forum",
  number =     "8",
  volume =     "29",
  pages =      "2492--2503",
  keywords =   "temporal coherence, ambient occlusion, real-time rendering",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2010/mattausch-2010-tao/",
}