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Ray tracing-based interactive diffuse indirect illumination

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Abstract

Despite great efforts in recent years to accelerate global illumination computation, the real-time ray tracing of fully dynamic scenes to support photorealistic indirect illumination effects has yet to be achieved in computer graphics. In this paper, we propose an extended ray tracing model that can be readily implemented on a GPU to facilitate the interactive generation of diffuse indirect illumination, the quality of which is comparable to that generated by the traditional, time-consuming photon mapping method and final gathering. Our method employs three types of (multilevel) grids to represent the indirect light in a scene using a form that facilitates the efficient estimation of the reflected radiance caused by diffuse interreflection. This method includes the mathematical tool of spherical harmonics and a rendering scheme that performs the final gathering step with a minimal cost during ray tracing, which guarantees the interactive frame rates. We evaluated our technique using several dynamic scenes with nontrivial complexity, which demonstrated its effectiveness.

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Acknowledgments

The test scenes are courtesy of J. Helenklaken (Kitchen), M. Dabrovic (Sponza), A. Grynberg and G. Ward (Conference), I. Wald (Ben), and R. Sumner and J. Popovic (Elephant and Horse). This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MOE) (No. 2012R1A1A2008958).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graphics Laboratory, Digital Media and Communications R&D Center, Samsung Electronics, Suwon, 443-742, Republic of Korea

    Byungjoon Chang

  2. Department of Multimedia, Dongguk University, Seoul, 100-715, Republic of Korea

    Sanghun Park

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, 121-742, Republic of Korea

    Insung Ihm

Authors
  1. Byungjoon Chang
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  2. Sanghun Park
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  3. Insung Ihm
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Correspondence to Sanghun Park or Insung Ihm.

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Chang, B., Park, S. & Ihm, I. Ray tracing-based interactive diffuse indirect illumination. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 7371–7390 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2655-9

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