Journal
ACM TRANSACTIONS ON GRAPHICS
Volume 38, Issue 6, Pages -Publisher
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
DOI: 10.1145/3355089.3356559
Keywords
participating media; transmittance; null collision; null scattering; stochastic sampling; Monte Carlo integration
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [IIS-1812796]
- Czech Science Foundation [19-07626S]
- Charles University [SVV-2017-260452]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Computing the light attenuation between two given points is an essential yet expensive task in volumetric light transport simulation. Existing unbiased transmittance estimators are all based on null-scattering random walks enabled by augmenting the media with fictitious matter. This formulation prevents the use of traditional Monte Carlo estimator variance analysis, thus the efficiency of such met hods is understood from a mostly empirical perspective. In this paper, we present several novel integral formulations of volumetric transmittance in which existing estimators arise as direct Monte Carlo estimators. Breaking from physical intuition, we show that the null-scattering concept is not strictly required for unbiased transmittance estimation, but is a form of control variates for effectively reducing variance. Our formulations bring new insight into the problem and the efficiency of existing estimators. They also provide a framework for devising new types of transmittance estimators with distinct and complementary performance tradeoffs, as well as a clear recipe for applying sample stratification.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available