Computer Graphics
TU Braunschweig

Visibility sweeps for joint-hierarchical importance sampling of direct lighting for stochastic volume rendering


Visibility sweeps for joint-hierarchical importance sampling of direct lighting for stochastic volume rendering

Physically-based light transport in heterogeneous volumetric data is computationally expensive because the rendering integral (particularly visibility) has to be stochastically solved. We present a visibility estimation method in concert with an importance-sampling technique for efficient and unbiased stochastic volume rendering. Our solution relies on a joint strategy, which involves the environmental illumination and visibility inside of the volume. A major contribution of our method is a fast sweeping-plane algorithm to progressively estimate partial occlusions at discrete locations, where we store the result using an octahedral representation. We then rely on a quadtree-based hierarchy to perform a joint importance sampling. Our technique is unbiased, requires little precomputation, is highly parallelizable, and is applicable to a various volume data sets, dynamic transfer functions, and changing environmental lighting.


Author(s): Thomas Kroes, Martin Eisemann, Elmar Eisemann
Published: June 2015
Type: Article in conference proceedings
Book: Proc. Graphics Interface (GI)
DOI: 10.5555/2788890.2788909
Presented at: Graphics Interface (GI) 2020
Note: Received the Best Student Paper Award at Graphics Interface 2015

BibTex PDF 



@inproceedings{kroes2020visibility,
  title = {Visibility sweeps for joint-hierarchical importance sampling of direct lighting for stochastic volume rendering},
  author = {Kroes, Thomas and Eisemann, Martin and Eisemann, Elmar},
  booktitle = {Proc. Graphics Interface ({GI})},
  doi = {10.5555/2788890.2788909},
  note = {Received the Best Student Paper Award at Graphics Interface 2015},
  pages = {97--104},
  month = {Jun},
  year = {2015}
}

Authors