Efficient Ray Tracing Through Aspheric Lenses and Imperfect Bokeh Synthesis

We present an efficient ray‐tracing technique to render bokeh effects produced by parametric aspheric lenses. Contrary to conventional spherical lenses, aspheric lenses do generally not permit a simple closed‐form solution of ray‐surface intersections. We propose a numerical root‐finding approach, which uses tight proxy surfaces to ensure a good initialization and convergence behavior. Additionally, we simulate mechanical imperfections resulting from the lens fabrication via a texture‐based approach. Fractional Fourier transform and spectral dispersion add additional realism to the synthesized bokeh effect. Our approach is well‐suited for execution on graphics processing units (GPUs) and we demonstrate complex defocus‐blur and lens‐flare effects.     

散景效果的真实感绘制

针对现有方法绘制的散景效果真实感较差的问题,提出一种基于几何光学理论的散景效果真实感绘制方法.该方法以光线传播的折射定律为基础,利用序列光线追踪方法对相机镜头的光学成像特性进行精确建模;对相机镜头的内部结构进行精确模拟,包括孔径光阑和渐晕光阑,以绘制出由孔径形状和渐晕共同作用的散景效果;利用几何光学理论和序列光线追踪方法精确计算出出射光瞳的位置和大小,以辅助光线采样,提高光线追踪效率.绘制结果表明,利用该方法能够绘制出较为逼真的散景效果,正确模拟了孔径形状和渐晕对散景效果的影响,并具有较高的光线追踪效率.     

基于Navarro示意眼模型的视觉真实感绘制*

结合人眼光学建模和计算机图形学的真实感绘制技术,提出一种基于Navarro示意眼模型的人眼视觉真实感绘制方法.利用Navarro模型与传统的单透镜模型相比能够更精确地模拟人眼的特性,将Navarro模型引入视觉真实感绘制中;采用光线追踪方法,加入非球面折射面的计算,精确地模拟人眼的成像特性.实验结果表明此种方法能够更精...     

Using Wavefront Tracing for the Visualization and Optimization of Progressive Lenses

Progressive addition lenses are a relatively new approach to compensate for defects of the human visual system. While traditional spectacles use rotationally symmetric lenses, progressive lenses require the specification of free-form surfaces. This poses difficult problems for the optimal design and its visual evaluation.
This paper presents two new techniques for the visualization of optical systems and the optimization of progressive lenses. Both are based on the same wavefront tracing approach to accurately evaluate the refraction properties of complex optical systems.
We use the results of wavefront tracing for continuously re-focusing the eye during rendering. Together with distribution ray tracing, this yields high-quality images that accurately simulate the visual quality of an optical system. The design of progressive lenses is difficult due to the trade-off between the desired properties of the lens and unavoidable optical errors, such as astigmatism and distortions. We use wavefront tracing to derive an accurate error functional describing the desired properties and the optical error across a lens. Minimizing this error yields optimal free-form lens surfaces.
While the basic approach is much more general, in this paper, we describe its application to the particular problem of designing and evaluating progressive lenses and demonstrate the benefits of the new approach with several example images.     

Stereo-based bokeh effects for photography

Bokeh, a sought-after photo rendering style of out-of-focus blur, typically aims at an esthetic quality which is not available to low-end consumer-grade cameras due to the lens design. We present a bokeh simulation method using stereo-vision techniques. We refine a depth map obtained by stereo matching, also using some minor user interaction. Overexposed regions are recovered according to depth information. A depth-aware bokeh effect is then applied with user-adjustable apertures sizes or shapes. We also simulate swirly bokeh, also known as cat-eye effect. Our method mainly aims at the visual quality of the bokeh effect rather than (so far) at time efficiency. Experiments show that our results are natural looking and that they can be comparable to bokeh effects achieved with expensive real-world bokeh-capable camera systems.     

GemstoneFire: adaptive dispersive ray tracing of polyhedrons

Synthesizing realistic images of gemstones requires techniques beyond the scope of normal ray tracing. The fire of such highly refractive objects is what makes gemstones attractive, and also imposes very high computational overhead to perform time consuming dispersive ray tracing. Gemstones are usually cut in polyhdrons as for example, a brillant cut. After a detailed analysis of the nature of dispersive ray tracing of polyhedral objects, we propose here a new method of using three simple rays adaptively to model the ray spreading caused by dispersive refraction. It is shown that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity to an order close to that of normal ray tracing.     

Sparse high‐degree polynomials for wide‐angle lenses

Rendering with accurate camera models greatly increases realism and improves the match of synthetic imagery to real‐life footage. Photographic lenses can be simulated by ray tracing, but the performance depends on the complexity of the lens system, and some operations required for modern algorithms, such as deterministic connections, can be difficult to achieve. We generalise the approach of polynomial optics, i.e. expressing the light field transformation from the sensor to the outer pupil using a polynomial, to work with extreme wide angle (fisheye) lenses and aspherical elements. We also show how sparse polynomials can be constructed from the large space of high‐degree terms (we tested up to degree 15). We achieve this using a variant of orthogonal matching pursuit instead of a Taylor series when computing the polynomials. We show two applications: photorealistic rendering using Monte Carlo methods, where we introduce a new aperture sampling technique that is suitable for light tracing, and an interactive preview method suitable for rendering with deep images.     

An Adaptive Spectral Rendering with a Perceptual Control

In this paper, we present a spectral rendering method based on a ray tracing algorithm and guided by a perceptual control of the error made. An adaptive representation of spectral data for light sources and materials is used and induces, for each pixel, the evaluation of an algebraic expression. For each visible wavelength, the computations of complex spread in refractive and dispersive materials, based on several photon maps, are locally restricted by an adaptive evaluation of the expression. This method allows to simulate high quality physically-based pictures and, in particular, some specific phenomena like dispersion in transparent objects, scattered caustics,. . .     

Efficient Monte Carlo rendering with realistic lenses

In this paper we present a novel approach to simulate image formation for a wide range of real world lenses in the Monte Carlo ray tracing framework. Our approach sidesteps the overhead of tracing rays through a system of lenses and requires no tabulation. To this end we first improve the precision of polynomial optics to closely match ground‐truth ray tracing. Second, we show how the Jacobian of the optical system enables efficient importance sampling, which is crucial for difficult paths such as sampling the aperture which is hidden behind lenses on both sides. Our results show that this yields converged images significantly faster than previous methods and accurately renders complex lens systems with negligible overhead compared to simple models, e.g. the thin lens model. We demonstrate the practicality of our method by incorporating it into a bidirectional path tracing framework and show how it can provide information needed for sophisticated light transport algorithms.     

PERIS: A programming environment for realistic image synthesis

A computer graphics system called PERIS is described. It offers two levels of user interfaces to serve both as a testbed to facilitate further research work and as a pragmatic system for CAD/CAM applications. Flexibility of the system is achieved by providing tools of solid modeling, surface modeling and procedural model representations for physical environment modeling and by including interfaces of immediate display, scan line rendering, ray tracing and two-way ray tracing for realistic image synthesis. A linear octree data structure is established to support the modeling and rendering processes, greatly reducing the computations involved. Meanwhile, we also introduce a new illumination model which unifies most of the existing models on a theoretical basis. An improved Cook-Torrance model is then derived. By examining the merits and limitations of the classic ray tracing methods, we propose a new rendering technique of two-way ray tracing that allows more accurate simulation of light propagation in the environment.     

Spectral Ray Differentials

Light refracted by a dispersive interface leads to beautifully colored patterns that can be rendered faithfully with spectral Monte‐Carlo methods. Regrettably, results often suffer from chromatic noise or banding, requiring high sampling rates and large amounts of memory compared to renderers operating in some trichromatic color space. Addressing this issue, we introduce spectral ray differentials, which describe the change of light direction with respect to changes in the spectrum. In analogy with the classic ray and photon differentials, this information can be used for filtering in the spectral domain. Effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by filtering for offline spectral light and path tracing as well as for an interactive GPU photon mapper based on splatting. Our results show considerably less chromatic noise and spatial aliasing while retaining good visual similarity to reference solutions with negligible overhead in the order of milliseconds.     

Realistic rendering with turbulent flows

This paper focuses on realistic rendering of scenes which include turbulent flows. In this respect we suggest solving the Navier–Stokes equations through a simple approach which offers better steadiness than classical methods. Then we adapt a ray‐tracing algorithm to treat convection motions by deflecting ray paths: we obtain effects of rendering through heat. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ray tracing-based interactive diffuse indirect illumination

Despite great efforts in recent years to accelerate global illumination computation, the real-time ray tracing of fully dynamic scenes to support photorealistic indirect illumination effects has yet to be achieved in computer graphics. In this paper, we propose an extended ray tracing model that can be readily implemented on a GPU to facilitate the interactive generation of diffuse indirect illumination, the quality of which is comparable to that generated by the traditional, time-consuming photon mapping method and final gathering. Our method employs three types of (multilevel) grids to represent the indirect light in a scene using a form that facilitates the efficient estimation of the reflected radiance caused by diffuse interreflection. This method includes the mathematical tool of spherical harmonics and a rendering scheme that performs the final gathering step with a minimal cost during ray tracing, which guarantees the interactive frame rates. We evaluated our technique using several dynamic scenes with nontrivial complexity, which demonstrated its effectiveness.     

基于自适应可见性滤波的近似软影绘制

针对全局光照下的物理正确软影绘制较难满足交互性的难题,提出体现遮挡对象 空间位置远近关系的可变半影近似绘制算法。首先,以光源中心点为参照通过基于光线跟踪的 遮挡测试方法生成二值光源可见性图;并提出每个可视场景点对应自适应可见性空间平滑滤波 器宽度的确定方法;然后执行带掩模计算的自适应可见性滤波来获得从可见区到非可见区平滑 过渡的可见性因子;最后在光线跟踪流程中使用可见性因子动态调制相应可视场景点不考虑遮 挡的直接光照值,再加上间接光照得到高真实感软影。实验结果表明：该算法效果与物理正确 阴影在柔和度方面非常接近,容易绘制镜面反射间接光照,且测试场景的帧率在 30 帧/秒以上, 满足交互性要求。     

Interactive Simulation of the Human Eye Depth of Field and Its Correction by Spectacle Lenses

This paper describes a fast rendering algorithm for verification of spectacle lens design. Our method simulates refraction corrections of astigmatism as well as myopia or presbyopia. Refraction and defocus are the main issues in the simulation. For refraction, our proposed method uses per-vertex basis ray tracing which warps the environment map and produces a real-time refracted image which is subjectively as good as ray tracing. Conventional defocus simulation was previously done by distribution ray tracing and a real-time solution was impossible. We introduce the concept of a blur field, which we use to displace every vertex according to its position. The blurring information is precomputed as a set of field values distributed to voxels which are formed by evenly subdividing the perspective projected space. The field values can be determined by tracing a wavefront from each voxel through the lens and the eye, and by evaluating the spread of light at the retina considering the best human accommodation effort. The blur field is stored as texture data and referred to by the vertex shader that displaces each vertex. With an interactive frame rate, blending the multiple rendering results produces a blurred image comparable to distribution ray tracing output.     

Shape and topology optimization of acoustic lens system using phase field method

A layout optimization method for a two-dimensional acoustic lens system used in underwater imaging is presented. To this end, a shape and topology optimization is formulated for the design problem of a lens system for the first time. The layout of a lens system to be optimized includes the number of lenses, shape of lens surfaces, distances between lenses, and lens materials. A phase field function is employed to implicitly parameterize the boundaries of the lenses, which move according to design sensitivities during optimization. Multiple lenses with different materials are optimized using a single phase field function. Because the ratio of the acoustic wavelength with respect to lens dimensions is large, diffraction effects should be taken into account. Accordingly, the performance of a lens system should be analyzed using wave acoustics and not the ray tracing method. The optimization problem is formulated to remove the aberrations of coma and field curvature. The validity of the proposed optimization method is demonstrated by solving benchmark design problems including a lens system with a large field of view.     

Foveated Real‐Time Ray Tracing for Head‐Mounted Displays

Head‐mounted displays with dense pixel arrays used for virtual reality applications require high frame rates and low latency rendering. This forms a challenging use case for any rendering approach. In addition to its ability of generating realistic images, ray tracing offers a number of distinct advantages, but has been held back mainly by its performance. In this paper, we present an approach that significantly improves image generation performance of ray tracing. This is done by combining foveated rendering based on eye tracking with reprojection rendering using previous frames in order to drastically reduce the number of new image samples per frame. To reproject samples a coarse geometry is reconstructed from a G‐Buffer. Possible errors introduced by this reprojection as well as parts that are critical to the perception are scheduled for resampling. Additionally, a coarse color buffer is used to provide an initial image, refined smoothly by more samples were needed. Evaluations and user tests show that our method achieves real‐time frame rates, while visual differences compared to fully rendered images are hardly perceivable. As a result, we can ray trace non‐trivial static scenes for the Oculus DK2 HMD at 1182 × 1464 per eye within the the VSync limits without perceived visual differences.     

加快光线跟踪计算的网格优化划分

网格是一类重要的光线跟踪加速结构,其结构简单、能快速创建.但是网格划分的尺度对光线跟踪的效率有很大的影响.针对此,提出一种代价预估计算方法.以度量网格划分对光线跟踪计算效率的影响,并由此计算网格优化划分的分辨率,首先根据模型类型和网格使用方式计算几种场景参数,分别预估网格创建、跟踪和空间的开销;然后根据不同应用需求,以相应的预估代价最小来进行网格的优化划分.与已有方法不同,文中方法考虑了场景中面片分布类型对网格划分的影响,提高了度量计算的精度;还综合考虑了网格创建时间、空间需求等因素,以便度量计算能根据绘制任务的不同进行相应的优化处理.该方法能更好地提高绘制效率,特别是能处理动态场景和面片非均匀分布的复杂场景,而这些是已有方法难以处理的.实验结果表明,文中方法的预估网格优化分辨率与实际的最优分辨率很接近,优于已有的类似工作.