Second-Order Approximation for Variance Reduction in Multiple Importance Sampling

dc.contributor.authorLu, Heqien_US
dc.contributor.authorPacanowski, Romainen_US
dc.contributor.authorGranier, Xavieren_US
dc.contributor.editorB. Levy, X. Tong, and K. Yinen_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-28T16:12:18Z
dc.date.available2015-02-28T16:12:18Z
dc.date.issued2013en_US
dc.description.abstractMonte Carlo Techniques are widely used in Computer Graphics to generate realistic images. Multiple Importance Sampling reduces the impact of choosing a dedicated strategy by balancing the number of samples between different strategies. However, an automatic choice of the optimal balancing remains a difficult problem. Without any scene characteristics knowledge, the default choice is to select the same number of samples from different strategies and to use them with heuristic techniques (e.g., balance, power or maximum). In this paper, we introduce a second-order approximation of variance for balance heuristic. Based on this approximation, we introduce an automatic distribution of samples for direct lighting without any prior knowledge of the scene characteristics. We demonstrate that for all our test scenes (with different types of materials, light sources and visibility complexity), our method actually reduces variance in average.We also propose an implementation with low overhead for offline and GPU applications. We hope that this approach will help developing new balancing strategies.en_US
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forumen_US
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12220en_US
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.en_US
dc.titleSecond-Order Approximation for Variance Reduction in Multiple Importance Samplingen_US
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