R-LODs: fast LOD-based ray tracing of massive models

We present a novel LOD (level-of-detail) algorithm to accelerate ray tracing of massive models. Our approach computes drastic simplifications of the model and the LODs are well integrated with the kd-tree data structure. We introduce a simple and efficient LOD metric to bound the error for primary and secondary rays. The LOD representation has small runtime overhead and our algorithm can be combined with ray coherence techniques and cache-coherent layouts to improve the performance. In practice, the use of LODs can alleviate aliasing artifacts and improve memory coherence. We implement our algorithm on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines and are able to achieve up to 2–20 times improvement in frame rate of rendering models consisting of tens or hundreds of millions of triangles with little loss in image quality.     

Anti-aliased Ray Tracing with Covers

A fast and effective object space method for antialiasing ray-traced pictures is introduced. Traditionally, anti-aliasing has been done using super-sampling. However, this is costly since it requires casting large numbers of rays to obtain sample densities above the displayed pixel density. It is also wasteful since much of the information in these samples is discarded when they are filtered to yield the anti-aliased pixels. We avoid these problems by performing the filtering in the object space using the geometry of ray-surface intersections rather than by casting extra rays. In addition, we only perform filtering at a pixel if edges are nearby. We detect these edges by observing the order in which the pixel's rays pass through cover surfaces constructed just inside and outside the surface of each object. Shadows, reflections and refractions can be anti-aliased using this method and a variety of object types can be handled including ellipsoids, polyhedra, and objects formed using set operations.
Our anti-aliasing gives a high image quality that can only be approached by using super-sampling densities at least four times the display pixel density. Moreover, since the overhead of our method is small, it would take three to four times as long to render an anti-aliased image using super-sampling than it would with our method. Furthermore, covers allow sampling densities less than the displayed pixel density. When this is done, anti-aliased images can be rendered twice as fast as with no anti-aliasing and six to eight times as fast as when super-sampling is used for anti-aliasing.     

Robust Image Denoising Using a Virtual Flash Image for Monte Carlo Ray Tracing

We propose an efficient and robust image‐space denoising method for noisy images generated by Monte Carlo ray tracing methods. Our method is based on two new concepts: virtual flash images and homogeneous pixels. Inspired by recent developments in flash photography, virtual flash images emulate photographs taken with a flash, to capture various features of rendered images without taking additional samples. Using a virtual flash image as an edge‐stopping function, our method can preserve image features that were not captured well only by existing edge‐stopping functions such as normals and depth values. While denoising each pixel, we consider only homogeneous pixels—pixels that are statistically equivalent to each other. This makes it possible to define a stochastic error bound of our method, and this bound goes to zero as the number of ray samples goes to infinity, irrespective of denoising parameters. To highlight the benefits of our method, we apply our method to two Monte Carlo ray tracing methods, photon mapping and path tracing, with various input scenes. We demonstrate that using virtual flash images and homogeneous pixels with a standard denoising method outperforms state‐of‐the‐art image‐space denoising methods.     

Computing exact aspect graphs of curved objects: Algebraic surfaces

This article presents an algorithm for computing the exact aspect graph of an opaque solid bounded by a smooth algebraic surface. Orthographic projection is assumed. The algorithm is based on a catalog of visual events available from singularity theory. It uses curve tracing, cell decomposition, homotopy continuation, and ray tracing to construct the regions of the view sphere delineated by visual-event curves. The algorithm has been fully implemented, and examples are presented.     

Fast,Sub‐pixel Antialiased Shadow Maps

Solving aliasing artifacts is an essential problem in shadow mapping approaches. Many works have been proposed, however, most of them focused on removing the texel‐level aliasing that results from the limited resolution of shadow maps. Little work has been done to solve the pixel‐level shadow aliasing that is produced by the rasterization on the screen plane. In this paper, we propose a fast, sub‐pixel antialiased shadowing algorithm to solve the pixel aliasing problem. Our work is based on the alias‐free shadow maps, which is capable of computing accurate per‐pixel shadow, and only incurs little cost to extend to sub‐pixel accuracy. Instead of direct supersampling the screen space, we take facets to approximate pixels in shadow testing. The shadowed area of one facet is rapidly evaluated by projecting blocker geometry onto a supersampled 2D occlusion mask with bitmasks fusion. It provides a sub‐pixel occlusion sampling so as to capture fine shadow details and features. Furthermore, we introduce the silhouette mask map that limits visibility evaluation to pixels only on the silhouette, which greatly reduces the computation cost. Our algorithm runs entirely on the GPU, achieving real‐time performance and is an order of magnitude faster than the brute‐force supersampling method to produce comparable 32× antialiased shadows.     

Modeling, animating, and rendering complex scenes using volumetrictextures

Complex repetitive scenes containing forests, foliage, grass, hair, or fur, are challenging for common modeling and rendering tools. The amount of data, the tediousness of modeling and animation tasks, and the cost of realistic rendering have caused such kind of scene to see only limited use even in high-end productions. The author describes how the use of volumetric textures is well suited to such scenes. These primitives can greatly simplify modeling and animation tasks. More importantly, they can be very efficiently rendered using ray tracing with few aliasing artifacts. The main idea, initially introduced by Kajiya and Kay (1989), is to represent a pattern of 3D geometry in a reference volume, that is tiled over an underlying surface much like a regular 2D texture. In our contribution, the mapping is independent of the mesh subdivision, the pattern can contain any kind of shape, and it is prefiltered at different scales as for MIP-mapping. Although the model encoding is volumetric, the rendering method differs greatly from traditional volume rendering. A volumetric texture only exists in the neighborhood of a surface, and the repeated instances (called texels) of the reference volume are spatially deformed. Furthermore, each voxel of the reference volume contains a key feature which controls the reflectance function that represents aggregate intravoxel geometry. This allows for ray tracing of highly complex scenes with very few aliasing artifacts, using a single ray per pixel (for the part of the scene using the volumetric texture representation). The major technical considerations of our method lie in the ray-path determination and in the specification of the reflectance function     

Sub‐Pixel Anti‐Aliasing Via Triangle‐Based Geometry Reconstruction

Anti‐aliasing has recently been employed as a post‐processing step to adapt to the deferred shading technique in real‐time applications. Some of these existing algorithms store supersampling geometric information as geometric buffer (G‐buffer) to detect and alleviate sub‐pixel‐level aliasing artifacts. However, the anti‐aliasing filter based on sampled sub‐pixel geometries only may introduce unfaithful shading information to the sub‐pixel color in uniform‐geometry regions, and large G‐buffer will increase memory storage and fetch overheads. In this paper, we present a new Triangle‐based Geometry Anti‐Aliasing (TGAA) algorithm, to address these problems. The coverage triangle of each screen pixel is accessed, and then, the coverage information between the triangle and neighboring sub‐pixels is stored in a screen‐resolution bitmask, which allows the geometric information to be stored and accessed in an inexpensive manner. Using triangle‐based geometry, TGAA can exclude irrelevant neighboring shading samples and achieve faithful anti‐aliasing filtering. In addition, a morphological method of estimating the geometric edges in high‐frequency geometry is incorporated into the TGAA's anti‐aliasing filter to complement the algorithm. The implementation results demonstrate that the algorithm is efficient and scalable for generating high‐quality anti‐aliased images.     

基于卷积神经网络的实时环境光遮蔽计算

环境光遮蔽是一种常用于计算机游戏以及可视化领域的低频全局光照模拟算法。已有的基于屏幕空间的环境光遮蔽计算方法虽然保证了计算的实时性,但是存在估计失真以及细节丢失等难以解决的问题。针对该问题,本文提出了一种结合低频光线追踪采样以及蒙特卡罗去噪的算法框架对环境光遮蔽进行实时计算。为了解决传统蒙特卡洛去噪算法无法实时处理的问题,提出了一种基于卷积神经网络的蒙特卡罗去噪算法,并针对问题对网络结构进行了改进和优化。验证实验证明基于卷积神经网络的方法能够对环境光遮蔽的去噪问题进行准确的处理,同时本文对卷积网络的改进在保持精度的基础上显著地提高了计算效率。对比实验显示了本文算法在保持与高频采样光线追踪算法相近效果的前提下可达到与基于屏幕空间环境光遮蔽计算方法相近的每秒数百帧计算效率。     

Time‐Continuous Quasi‐Monte Carlo Ray Tracing

Domain‐continuous visibility determination algorithms have proved to be very efficient at reducing noise otherwise prevalent in stochastic sampling. Even though they come with an increased overhead in terms of geometrical tests and visibility information management, their analytical nature provides such a rich integral that the pay‐off is often worth it. This paper presents a time‐continuous, primary visibility algorithm for motion blur aimed at ray tracing. Two novel intersection tests are derived and implemented. The first is for ray versus moving triangle and the second for ray versus moving AABB intersection. A novel take on shading is presented as well, where the time continuum of visible geometry is adaptively point‐sampled. Static geometry is handled using supplemental stochastic rays in order to reduce spatial aliasing. Finally, a prototype ray tracer with a full time‐continuous traversal kernel is presented in detail. The results are based on a variety of test scenarios and show that even though our time‐continuous algorithm has limitations, it outperforms multi‐jittered quasi‐Monte Carlo ray tracing in terms of image quality at equal rendering time, within wide sampling rate ranges.     

空间散乱点集Delaunay四面体剖分切割算法

提出最大空圆凸多边形和最大空球凸多面体的概念 .在此基础上 ,提出一种空间散乱点集 Delaunay四面体剖分算法 ,即对空间散乱点集首先进行最大空球凸多面体剖分 ,然后在多面体内部作 Delaunay四面体剖分 .这种方法消除了“退化”现象 (平面 3个以上点共圆或空间 4个以上点共球面 )引起的潜在错误 .最后分析了一类常见的 De-launay四面体剖分算法的潜在错误     

Rasterized Planar Face Complex

We consider a Planar Face Complex (PFC). It is defined by the immersion of a planar and connected graph G, which comprises a set of vertices joined by curved edges. G decomposes the plane into faces that need not be manifold or open-regularized and may be bounded by a single loop edge. The PFC may, for example, be used to represent the complex street network of a city, the decomposition of a continent into countries, or the inhomogeneous structure made of a large set of regions of different materials possibly with internal cracks. The rasterized Planar Face Complex (rPFC) proposed here provides a compact representation of an approximation of a PFC, where the precise location of each vertex is quantized to the pixel that contains it and where the precise geometry of each curved edge is approximated by the ordered list (with possible repetitions) of the pixels traversed by (a chosen polygonal approximation of) the edge. We claim three key contributions: (1) The geometric error between a PFC and its rPFC is bounded by the pixel half-diagonal. (2) In spite of such a drastic discretization of the geometry, the rPFC captures the exact topology of the original PFC (provided that no street lies entirely inside a single pixel) and supports standard graph traversal operators that permit to walk the loop of sidewalks along the streets that bound a face, to cross a street to the opposite sidewalk, or to cross streets in order while walking around their common junction. (3) The local connectivity and order information needed to provide the above functionality is stored at each pixel using only about 4 bits per crossing. We discuss the details of this representation, our implementation of its exact construction, four possible embodiments that offer different space/time efficiency compromises, experimental results, relations between rPFC and prior solutions.     

Constrained Convex Space Partition for Ray Tracing in Architectural Environments

This paper explores constrained convex space partition (CCSP) as a new acceleration structure for ray tracing. A CCSP is a graph, representing a space partition made up of empty convex volumes. The scene geometry is located on the boundary of the convex volumes. Therefore, each empty volume is bounded with two kinds of faces: occlusive ones (belonging to the scene geometry), and non‐occlusive ones. Given a ray, ray casting is performed by traversing the CCSP one volume at a time, until it hits the scene geometry. In this paper, this idea is applied to architectural scenes. We show that CCSP allows to cast several hundreds of millions of rays per second, even if they are not spatially coherent. Experiments are performed for large furnished buildings made up of hundreds of millions of polygons and containing thousands of light sources.     

多面体表面纹理映射方法的研究

文中运用两步映射原理解决了多面体的参数化问题,并提出了一种等积射方法。     

Non‐Linear Beam Tracing on a GPU

Beam tracing combines the flexibility of ray tracing and the speed of polygon rasterization. However, beam tracing so far only handles linear transformations; thus, it is only applicable to linear effects such as planar mirror reflections but not to non‐linear effects such as curved mirror reflection, refraction, caustics and shadows. In this paper, we introduce non‐linear beam tracing to render these non‐linear effects. Non‐linear beam tracing is highly challenging because commodity graphics hardware supports only linear vertex transformation and triangle rasterization. We overcome this difficulty by designing a non‐linear graphics pipeline and implementing it on top of a commodity GPU. This allows beams to be non‐linear where rays within the same beam do not have to be parallel or intersect at a single point. Using these non‐linear beams, real‐time GPU applications can render secondary rays via polygon streaming similar to how they render primary rays. A major strength of this methodology is that it naturally supports fully dynamic scenes without the need to pre‐store a scene database. Utilizing our approach, non‐linear ray tracing effects can be rendered in real‐time on a commodity GPU under a unified framework.     

Appearance-based face recognition and light-fields

Arguably the most important decision to be made when developing an object recognition algorithm is selecting the scene measurements or features on which to base the algorithm. In appearance-based object recognition, the features are chosen to be the pixel intensity values in an image of the object. These pixel intensities correspond directly to the radiance of light emitted from the object along certain rays in space. The set of all such radiance values over all possible rays is known as the plenoptic function or light-field. In this paper, we develop a theory of appearance-based object recognition from light-fields. This theory leads directly to an algorithm for face recognition across pose that uses as many images of the face as are available, from one upwards. All of the pixels, whichever image they come from, are treated equally and used to estimate the (eigen) light-field of the object. The eigen light-field is then used as the set of features on which to base recognition, analogously to how the pixel intensities are used in appearance-based face and object recognition.     

Interactive Glossy Reflections using GPU‐based Ray Tracing with Adaptive LOD

We present an interactive GPU‐based algorithm for accurately rendering high‐quality, dynamic glossy reflection effects from both HDR environment maps and local scene objects. Our method uses hardware rasterization to produce primary pixels, and GPU‐based BRDF importance sampling [ [CK07] ] to quickly generate reflected rays. We utilize a fast GPU ray tracer proposed by Carr et al. [ [CHCH06] ] to compute reflection hits. Our main contribution is an adaptive level‐of‐detail (LOD) control algorithm that greatly improves ray tracing performance during reflection shading. Specifically, we use the solid angle represented by each reflected ray to adaptively pick the level of termination in the BVH traversal step during ray tracing. This leads to 2 ～ 3x speedup over an unmodified implementation of [ [CHCH06] ]. Based on the same solid angle measure, we derive a texture filtering formula to reduce reflection aliasing artifacts, taking advantage of hardware MIP mapping. This extends the filtering algorithm presented in [ [CK07] ] from environment mapping to local scene reflection. Using our algorithm, we demonstrate interactive rendering rates for several scenes featuring dynamic lighting and material changes, spatially varying BRDF parameters, and rigid‐body object movement.     

Ray Differentials and Multiresolution Geometry Caching for Distribution Ray Tracing in Complex Scenes

When rendering only directly visible objects, ray tracing a few levels of specular reflection from large, low‐curvaturesurfaces, and ray tracing shadows from point‐like light sources, the accessed geometry is coherentand a geometry cache performs well. But in many other cases, the accessed geometry is incoherent and a standardgeometry cache performs poorly: ray tracing of specular reflection from highly curved surfaces, tracing rays thatare many reflection levels deep, and distribution ray tracing for wide glossy reflection, global illumination, widesoft shadows, and ambient occlusion. Fortunately, less geometric accuracy is necessary in the incoherent cases.This observation can be formalized by looking at the ray differentials for different types of scattering: coherentrays have small differentials, while incoherent rays have large differentials. We utilize this observation to obtainefficient multiresolution caching of geometry and textures (including displacement maps) for classic and distributionray tracing in complex scenes. We use an existing multiresolution caching scheme (originally developed forscanline rendering) for textures and displacement maps, and introduce a multiresolution geometry caching schemefor tessellated surfaces. The multiresolution geometry caching scheme makes it possible to efficiently render scenesthat, if fully tessellated, would use 100 times more memory than the geometry cache size.     

Undersampled Light Field Rendering by a Plane Sweep

Images synthesized by light field rendering exhibit aliasing artifacts when the light field is undersampled; adding new light field samples improves the image quality and reduces aliasing but new samples are expensive to acquire. Light field rays are traditionally gathered directly from the source images, but new rays can also be inferred through geometry estimation. This paper describes a light field rendering approach based on this principle that estimates geometry from the set of source images using multi‐baseline stereo reconstruction to supplement the existing light field rays to meet the minimum sampling requirement. The rendering and reconstruction steps are computed over a set of planes in the scene volume, and output images are synthesized by compositing results from these planes together. The planes are each processed independently and the number of planes can be adjusted to scale the amount of computation to achieve the desired frame rate. The reconstruction fidelity (and by extension image quality) is improved by a library of matching templates to support matches along discontinuities in the image or geometry (e.g. object profiles and concavities). Given a set of silhouette images, the visual hull can be constructed and applied to further improve reconstruction by removing outlier matches. The algorithm is efficiently implemented by a set of image filter operations on commodity graphics hardware and achieves image synthesis at interactive rates.     

Anti-aliasing with Stratified B-spline Filters of Arbitrary Degree

A simple and elegant method is presented to perform anti‐aliasing in raytraced images. The method uses stratified sampling to reduce the occurrence of artefacts in an image and features a B‐spline filter to compute the final luminous intensity at each pixel. The method is scalable through the specification of the filter degree. A B‐spline filter of degree one amounts to a simple anti‐aliasing scheme with box filtering. Increasing the degree of the B‐spline generates progressively smoother filters. Computation of the filter values is done in a recursive way, as part of a sequence of Newton‐Raphson iterations, to obtain the optimal sample positions in screen space. The proposed method can perform both anti‐aliasing in space and in time, the latter being more commonly known as motion blur. We show an application of the method to the ray casting of implicit procedural surfaces.     

ARTS: Accelerated Ray-Tracing System

In this article we propose algorithms that address the two basic problems encountered in generating continuous-tone images by ray tracing: speed and aliasing. We examine previous approaches to the problem and then propose a scheme based on the coherency of an auxiliary data structure imposed on the original object domain. After investigating both simple spatial enumeration and a hybrid octree approach, we developed 3DDDA, a 3D line generator for efficient traversing of both structures. 3DDDA provides an order of magnitude improvement in processing speed compared to other known ray-tracing methods. Processing time is found to be virtually independent of the number of objects involved in the scene. For large numbers of objects, this method actully becomes faster than scan-line methods. To remove jags from edges, a scheme for identifying edge orientation and distance from pixel center to true edge has been implemented. The time required for antialiasing depends on the total length of the edges encountered, but it is normally only a fractional addition to the time needed to produce the scene without antialiasing.