Filtering Techniques for Low-Noise Previews of Interactive Stochastic Ray Tracing

Progressive stochastic ray tracing is increasingly used in interactive applications. Examples of such applications are interactive design reviews and digital content creation. This dissertation aims at advancing this development. For one thing, two filtering techniques are presented, which can generate fast and reliable previews of global illumination solutions. For another thing, a system architecture is presented, which supports exchangeable rendering back-ends in distributed rendering systems

Healthcare Fact Check: Regional Variations in German Healthcare

Overuse, underuse and misuse in the German health system have been debated by experts for years. The Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System called attention to the problem as early as 2001. Valuable resources are used inappropriately and unnecessarily, and often the regional provision of healthcare services and the range of healthcare options offered do not reflect people’s needs

Farbrealistisches Rendering: (TP 2.5)

Kap. 4 wendet sich den Themen Simulation und Rendering zu. Ziel ist es, Entscheidungen in zunehmendem Maße an virtuellen Modellen zu treffen. Dazu müssen sowohl die funktionellen Eigenschaften als auch die visuellen Eigenschaften virtueller Modelle und Darstellungen weiter verbessert werden. Schwerpunkte der Forschungsarbeiten sind die Simulation flexibler Bauteile sowie die Erstellung von echtzeitfähigen Menschmodellen. Zur Verbesserung der visuellen Darstellung werden multispektrales Rendering, Methoden zur Farbkalibrierung und Bild-in-Bild-Technologien zur Erhöhung der lokalen Auflösung der Bildschirmdarstellung betrachtet

Farbrealistisches Rendering : (TP 2.5)

Kap. 4 wendet sich den Themen Simulation und Rendering zu. Ziel ist es, Entscheidungen in zunehmendem Maße an virtuellen Modellen zu treffen. Dazu müssen sowohl die funktionellen Eigenschaften als auch die visuellen Eigenschaften virtueller Modelle und Darstellungen weiter verbessert werden. Schwerpunkte der Forschungsarbeiten sind die Simulation flexibler Bauteile sowie die Erstellung von echtzeitfähigen Menschmodellen. Zur Verbesserung der visuellen Darstellung werden multispektrales Rendering, Methoden zur Farbkalibrierung und Bild-in-Bild-Technologien zur Erhöhung der lokalen Auflösung der Bildschirmdarstellung betrachtet

CommonVolumeShader: Simple and portable specification of volumetric light transport in X3D

Rendering volumetric phenomena with believable appearance can add tremendous realism to virtual scenes. We introduce the CommonVolumeShader node, an extension of the X3D standard which has been specifically designed for physically-based rendering of participating media. CommonVolumeShader allows content authors to specify optical properties in a concise and purely declarative way and can accurately capture the appearance of many volumetric phenomena. We demonstrate results with implementations for an interactive ray tracer and a rasterization-based pipeline

Filtering noise in progressive stochastic ray tracing - Four optimizations to improve speed and robustness

We present an improved version of a state-of-the-art noise reduction technique for progressive stochastic rendering. Our additions make the method significantly faster at the cost of an acceptable loss in quality. Additionally, we improve the robustness of the method in the presence of difficult features like glossy reflection, caustics, and antialiased edges. We show with visual and numerical comparisons that our extensions improve the overall performance of the original approach and make it more broadly applicable

An Error Bound for Decoupled Visibility with Application to Relighting

Monte Carlo estimation of direct lighting is often dominated by visibility queries. If an error is tolerable, the calculations can be sped up by using a simple scalar occlusion factor per light source to attenuate radiance, thus decoupling the expensive estimation of visibility from the comparatively cheap sampling of unshadowed radiance and BRDF. In this paper we analyze the error associated with this approximation and derive an upper bound. We demonstrate in a simple relighting application how our result can be used to reduce noise by introducing a controlled error if a reliable estimate of the visibility is already available

An Error Bound for Decoupled Visibility with Application to Relighting

Monte Carlo estimation of direct lighting is often dominated by visibility queries. If an error is tolerable, the calculations can be sped up by using a simple scalar occlusion factor per light source to attenuate radiance, thus decoupling the expensive estimation of visibility from the comparatively cheap sampling of unshadowed radiance and BRDF. In this paper we analyze the error associated with this approximation and derive an upper bound. We demonstrate in a simple relighting application how our result can be used to reduce noise by introducing a controlled error if a reliable estimate of the visibility is already available

Practical Noise Reduction for Progressive Stochastic Ray Tracing with Perceptual Control

A proposed method reduces noise in stochastic ray tracing for interactive progressive rendering. The method accumulates high-variance light paths in a separate buffer, which is filtered by a high-quality edge-preserving filter. Then, this method adds a combination of the noisy unfiltered samples and the less noisy (but biased) filtered samples to the low-variance samples to form the final image. A novel per-pixel blending operator combines both contributions in a way that respects a user-defined threshold on perceived noise. This method can provide fast, reliable previews, even in the presence of complex features such as specular surfaces and high-frequency textures. At the same time, it's consistent in that the bias due to filtering vanishes in the limit