Optimised Path Space Regularisation

Abstract
We present Optimised Path Space Regularisation (OPSR), a novel regularisation technique for forward path tracing algorithms. Our regularisation controls the amount of roughness added to materials depending on the type of sampled paths and trades a small error in the estimator for a drastic reduction of variance in difficult paths, including indirectly visible caustics. We formulate the problem as a joint bias-variance minimisation problem and use differentiable rendering to optimise our model. The learnt parameters generalise to a large variety of scenes irrespective of their geometric complexity. The regularisation added to the underlying light transport algorithm naturally allows us to handle the problem of near-specular and glossy path chains robustly. Our method consistently improves the convergence of path tracing estimators, including state-of-the-art path guiding techniques where it enables finding otherwise hard-to-sample paths and thus, in turn, can significantly speed up the learning of guiding distributions.
Description

        
@article{
10.1111:cgf.14347
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
Optimised Path Space Regularisation
}}, author = {
Weier, Philippe
and
Droske, Marc
and
Hanika, Johannes
and
Weidlich, Andrea
and
Vorba, JirĂ­
}, year = {
2021
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/cgf.14347
} }
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