Visualization of Coherent Structures of Light Transport

Abstract

Inspired by vector field topology, an established tool for the extraction and identification of important features of flows and vector fields, we develop means for the analysis of the structure of light transport. For that, we derive an analogy to vector field topology that defines coherent structures in light transport. We also introduce Finite-Time Path Deflection (FTPD), a scalar quantity that represents the deflection characteristic of all light transport paths passing through a given point in space. For virtual scenes, the FTPD can be computed directly using path-space Monte Carlo integration. We visualize the FTPD field for several example scenes and discuss the revealed structures. Lastly, we show that the coherent regions visualized by the FTPD are closely related to the coherent regions in our new topologically-motivated analysis of light transport. FTPD visualizations are thus also visualizations of the structure of light transport.