Spencer, BenJones, Mark W.I. Navazo, P. Poulin2015-02-282015-02-2820131467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12028This paper presents a novel approach to detecting and preserving fine illumination structure within photon maps. Data derived from each photon's primal trajectory is encoded and used to build a high-dimensional kd-tree. Incorporation of these new parameters allows for precise differentiation between intersecting ray envelopes, thus minimizing detail degradation when combined with photon relaxation. We demonstrate how parameter-aware querying is beneficial in both detecting and removing noise. We also propose a more robust structure descriptor based on principal components analysis that better identifies anisotropic detail at the sub-kernel level.We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in several example scenes and show significant improvements when rendering complex caustics compared to previous methods.