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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Correlation-Aware Multiple Importance Sampling for Bidirectional Rendering Algorithms
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Grittmann, Pascal; Georgiev, Iliyan; Slusallek, Philipp; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    Combining diverse sampling techniques via multiple importance sampling (MIS) is key to achieving robustness in modern Monte Carlo light transport simulation. Many such methods additionally employ correlated path sampling to boost efficiency. Photon mapping, bidirectional path tracing, and path-reuse algorithms construct sets of paths that share a common prefix. This correlation is ignored by classical MIS heuristics, which can result in poor technique combination and noisy images.We propose a practical and robust solution to that problem. Our idea is to incorporate correlation knowledge into the balance heuristic, based on known path densities that are already required for MIS. This correlation-aware heuristic can achieve considerably lower error than the balance heuristic, while avoiding computational and memory overhead.
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    Temporally Reliable Motion Vectors for Real-time Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Zeng, Zheng; Liu, Shiqiu; Yang, Jinglei; Wang, Lu; Yan, Ling-Qi; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    Real-time ray tracing (RTRT) is being pervasively applied. The key to RTRT is a reliable denoising scheme that reconstructs clean images from significantly undersampled noisy inputs, usually at 1 sample per pixel as limited by current hardware's computing power. The state of the art reconstruction methods all rely on temporal filtering to find correspondences of current pixels in the previous frame, described using per-pixel screen-space motion vectors. While these approaches are demonstrated powerful, they suffer from a common issue that the temporal information cannot be used when the motion vectors are not valid, i.e. when temporal correspondences are not obviously available or do not exist in theory. We introduce temporally reliable motion vectors that aim at deeper exploration of temporal coherence, especially for the generally-believed difficult applications on shadows, glossy reflections and occlusions, with the key idea to detect and track the cause of each effect. We show that our temporally reliable motion vectors produce significantly better temporal results on a variety of dynamic scenes when compared to the state of the art methods, but with negligible performance overhead.
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    Real-time Denoising Using BRDF Pre-integration Factorization
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Zhuang, Tao; Shen, Pengfei; Wang, Beibei; Liu, Ligang; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Path tracing has been used for real-time renderings, thanks to the powerful GPU device. Unfortunately, path tracing produces noisy rendered results, thus, filtering or denoising is often applied as a post-process to remove the noise. Previous works produce high-quality denoised results, by accumulating the temporal samples. However, they cannot handle the details from bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) maps (e.g. roughness map). In this paper, we introduce the BRDF preintegration factorization for denoising to better preserve the details from BRDF maps. More specifically, we reformulate the rendering equation into two components: the BRDF pre-integration component and the weighted-lighting component. The BRDF pre-integration component is noise-free, since it does not depend on the lighting. Another key observation is that the weighted-lighting component tends to be smooth and low-frequency, which indicates that it is more suitable for denoising than the final rendered image. Hence, the weighted-lighting component is denoised individually. Our BRDF pre-integration demodulation approach is flexible for many real-time filtering methods. We have implemented it in spatio-temporal varianceguided filtering (SVGF), ReLAX and ReBLUR. Compared to the original methods, our method manages to better preserve the details from BRDF maps, while both the memory and time cost are negligible.
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    Practical Face Reconstruction via Differentiable Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Dib, Abdallah; Bharaj, Gaurav; Ahn, Junghyun; Thébault, Cédric; Gosselin, Philippe; Romeo, Marco; Chevallier, Louis; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    We present a differentiable ray-tracing based novel face reconstruction approach where scene attributes - 3D geometry, reflectance (diffuse, specular and roughness), pose, camera parameters, and scene illumination - are estimated from unconstrained monocular images. The proposed method models scene illumination via a novel, parameterized virtual light stage, which in-conjunction with differentiable ray-tracing, introduces a coarse-to-fine optimization formulation for face reconstruction. Our method can not only handle unconstrained illumination and self-shadows conditions, but also estimates diffuse and specular albedos. To estimate the face attributes consistently and with practical semantics, a two-stage optimization strategy systematically uses a subset of parametric attributes, where subsequent attribute estimations factor those previously estimated. For example, self-shadows estimated during the first stage, later prevent its baking into the personalized diffuse and specular albedos in the second stage. We show the efficacy of our approach in several real-world scenarios, where face attributes can be estimated even under extreme illumination conditions. Ablation studies, analyses and comparisons against several recent state-of-the-art methods show improved accuracy and versatility of our approach. With consistent face attributes reconstruction, our method leads to several style - illumination, albedo, self-shadow - edit and transfer applications, as discussed in the paper.
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    A Multi-pass Method for Accelerated Spectral Sampling
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Ruit, Mark van de; Eisemann, Elmar; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Spectral Monte Carlo rendering can simulate advanced light phenomena, such as chromatic dispersion, but typically shows a slow convergence behavior. Properly sampling the spectral domain can be challenging in scenes with many complex spectral distributions. To this end, we propose a multi-pass approach. We build and store coarse screen-space estimates of incident spectral radiance and use these to then importance sample the spectral domain. Hereby, we lower variance and reduce noise with little overhead. Our method handles challenging scenarios with difficult spectral distributions, many different emitters, and participating media. Finally, it can be integrated into existing spectral rendering methods for an additional acceleration.
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    Consistent Post-Reconstruction for Progressive Photon Mapping
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Choi, Hajin; Moon, Bochang; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Photon mapping is a light transport algorithm that simulates various rendering effects (e.g., caustics) robustly, and its progressive variants, progressive photon mapping (PPM) methods, can produce a biased but consistent rendering output. PPM estimates radiance using a kernel density estimation whose parameters (bandwidths) are adjusted progressively, and this refinement enables to reduce its estimation bias. Nonetheless, many iterations (and thus a large number of photons) are often required until PPM produces nearly converged estimates. This paper proposes a post-reconstruction that improves the performance of PPM by reducing residual errors in PPM estimates. Our key idea is to take multiple PPM estimates with multi-level correlation structures, and fuse the input images using a weight function trained by supervised learning with maintaining the consistency of PPM. We demonstrate that our technique boosts an existing PPM technique for various rendering scenes.
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    Neural Sequence Transformation
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Mukherjee, Sabyasachi; Mukherjee, Sayan; Hua, Binh-Son; Umetani, Nobuyuki; Meister, Daniel; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Monte Carlo integration is a technique for numerically estimating a definite integral by stochastically sampling its integrand. These samples can be averaged to make an improved estimate, and the progressive estimates form a sequence that converges to the integral value on the limit. Unfortunately, the sequence of Monte Carlo estimates converges at a rate of O(pn), where n denotes the sample count, effectively slowing down as more samples are drawn. To overcome this, we can apply sequence transformation, which transforms one converging sequence into another with the goal of accelerating the rate of convergence. However, analytically finding such a transformation for Monte Carlo estimates can be challenging, due to both the stochastic nature of the sequence, and the complexity of the integrand. In this paper, we propose to leverage neural networks to learn sequence transformations that improve the convergence of the progressive estimates of Monte Carlo integration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several canonical 1D integration problems as well as applications in light transport simulation.
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    Geometric Sample Reweighting for Monte Carlo Integration
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Guo, Jerry Jinfeng; Eisemann, Elmar; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, Karan
    Numerical integration is fundamental in multiple Monte Carlo rendering problems. We present a sample reweighting scheme, including underlying theory, and analysis of numerical performance for the integration of an unknown one-dimensional function. Our method is simple to implement and builds upon the insight to link the weights to a function reconstruction process during integration. We provide proof that our solution is unbiased in one-dimensional cases and consistent in multi-dimensional cases. We illustrate its effectiveness in several use cases.
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    Sampling from Quadric-Based CSG Surfaces
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Trettner, Philip; Kobbelt, Leif; Binder, Nikolaus and Ritschel, Tobias
    We present an efficient method to create samples directly on surfaces defined by constructive solid geometry (CSG) trees or graphs. The generated samples can be used for visualization or as an approximation to the actual surface with strong guarantees. We chose to use quadric surfaces as CSG primitives as they can model classical primitives such as planes, cubes, spheres, cylinders, and ellipsoids, but also certain saddle surfaces. More importantly, they are closed under affine transformations, a desirable property for a modeling system. We also propose a rendering method that performs local quadric ray-tracing and clipping to achieve pixel-perfect accuracy and hole-free rendering.
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    Learning Multiple-Scattering Solutions for Sphere-Tracing of Volumetric Subsurface Effects
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Leonard, Ludwic; Höhlein, Kevin; Westermann, Rüdiger; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    Accurate subsurface scattering solutions require the integration of optical material properties along many complicated light paths. We present a method that learns a simple geometric approximation of random paths in a homogeneous volume with translucent material. The generated representation allows determining the absorption along the path as well as a direct lighting contribution, which is representative of all scatter events along the path. A sequence of conditional variational auto-encoders (CVAEs) is trained to model the statistical distribution of the photon paths inside a spherical region in the presence of multiple scattering events. A first CVAE learns how to sample the number of scatter events, occurring on a ray path inside the sphere, which effectively determines the probability of this ray to be absorbed. Conditioned on this, a second model predicts the exit position and direction of the light particle. Finally, a third model generates a representative sample of photon position and direction along the path, which is used to approximate the contribution of direct illumination due to in-scattering. To accelerate the tracing of the light path through the volumetric medium toward the solid boundary, we employ a sphere-tracing strategy that considers the light absorption and can perform a statistically accurate next-event estimation. We demonstrate efficient learning using shallow networks of only three layers and no more than 16 nodes. In combination with a GPU shader that evaluates the CVAEs' predictions, performance gains can be demonstrated for a variety of different scenarios. We analyze the approximation error that is introduced by the data-driven scattering simulation and shed light on the major sources of error.