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Progressive photon mapping

Published: 01 December 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces a simple and robust progressive global illumination algorithm based on photon mapping. Progressive photon mapping is a multi-pass algorithm where the first pass is ray tracing followed by any number of photon tracing passes. Each photon tracing pass results in an increasingly accurate global illumination solution that can be visualized in order to provide progressive feedback. Progressive photon mapping uses a new radiance estimate that converges to the correct radiance value as more photons are used. It is not necessary to store the full photon map, and unlike standard photon mapping it possible to compute a global illumination solution with any desired accuracy using a limited amount of memory. Compared with existing Monte Carlo ray tracing methods progressive photon mapping provides an efficient and robust alternative in the presence of complex light transport such as caustics and in particular reflections of caustics.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 27, Issue 5
December 2008
552 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1409060
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 December 2008
Published in TOG Volume 27, Issue 5

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Author Tags

  1. density estimation
  2. global illumination
  3. photon mapping
  4. sampling and reconstruction

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  • (2024)Cache Points for Production-Scale Occlusion-Aware Many-Lights Sampling and Volumetric ScatteringProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670993(1-19)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
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