Probabilistic illumination-aware filtering for Monte Carlo rendering

Ian C. Doidge and Mark W. Jones

Abstract

Noise removal for Monte Carlo global illumination rendering is a well known problem, and has seen significant attention from image-based filtering methods. However, many state of the art methods breakdown in the presence of high frequency features, complex lighting and materials. In this work we present a probabilistic image based noise removal and irradiance filtering framework that preserves this high frequency detail such as hard shadows and glossy reflections, and imposes no restrictions on the characteristics of the light transport or materials. We maintain perpixel clusters of the path traced samples and, using statistics from these clusters, derive an illumination aware filtering scheme based on the discrete Poisson probability distribution. Furthermore, we filter the incident radiance of the samples, allowing us to preserve and filter across high frequency and complex textures without limiting the effectiveness of the filter.

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DOI

10.1007/s00371-013-0807-3
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0807-3

Citation

Ian C. Doidge and Mark W. Jones, Probabilistic illumination-aware filtering for Monte Carlo rendering, The Visual Computer, June 2013, Volume 29, Issue 6-8, 707-716. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0807-3

BibTeX

@ARTICLE{Probabilistic_MC_Filtering,
	author = {Doidge, Ian C. and Jones, Mark W.},
	title = {Probabilistic illumination-aware filtering for Monte Carlo rendering},
	journal = {The Visual Computer},
	year = {2013},
	pages = {1-10},
	doi = {10.1007/s00371-013-0807-3},
	issn = {0178-2789},
	language = {English},
	publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0807-3},
	date={2013-06-02},
}