A Spatial Target Function for Metropolis Photon Tracing

Adrien Gruson
Université de Rennes 1
IRISA Mickael Ribardiere
Université de Poitiers
XLIM-SIC Martin Šik
Charles University, Prague
Jiří Vorba
Charles University, Prague

Rémy Cozot
Université de Rennes 1
IRISA Kadi Bouatouch
Université de Rennes 1
IRISA Jaroslav Křivánek
Charles University, Prague

Abstract

The human visual system is sensitive to relative differences in luminance but light transport simulation algorithms based on Metropolis sampling often result in a highly non-uniform relative error distribution over the rendered image. While this issue has previously been addressed in the context of the Metropolis light transport algorithm, our work focuses on Metropolis photon tracing. We present a new target function for Metropolis photon tracing that ensures good stratification of photons leading to pixel estimates with equalized relative error. We develop a hierarchical scheme for progressive construction of the target function from paths sampled during rendering. In addition to the approach taken in previous work, where the target function is defined in the image plane, ours can be associated with compact spatial regions. This allows us to take advantage of illumination coherence to more robustly estimate the target function while adapting to geometry discontinuities. To sample from this target function, we design a new replica exchange Metropolis scheme. We apply our algorithm in progressive photon mapping and show that it often outperforms alternative approaches in terms of image quality by a large margin.

Publication

A. Gruson, M. Ribardiere, M. Šik, J. Vorba, R. Cozot, K. Bouatouch, J. Křivánek. A Spatial Target Function for Metropolis Photon Tracing. ACM Transaction on Graphics, vol. 36, no. 1 (Feb 2017) ... DOI | BibTeX

Links and Downloads

paper	supplemental document	additional results	code

pdf (3 MB)	zip (128 MB)	html	github

Acknowledgments

The Mirror Balls scene in Fig. 10 is courtesy of Toshiya Hachisuka. The Dinner hall scene (Fig. 7 and 9) is courtesy of Gregzaal. The Tea time scene (Fig. 11) is courtesy of Xev. The work was supported by Charles University in Prague, projects GA UK 164815 and 340915, by the grant SVV-2016-260332, and by the Czech Science Foundation grant 16-18964S. Thanks to Oskar Elek for proofreading the paper.