Exploiting temporal coherence in global illumination

Abstract

Producing high quality animations featuring rich object appearance and compelling lighting effects is very time consuming using traditional frame-by-frame rendering systems. In this paper we present a number of global illumination and rendering solutions that exploit temporal coherence in lighting distribution for subsequent frames to improve the computation performance and overall animation quality. Our strategy relies on extending into temporal domain well-known global illumination techniques such as density estimation photon tracing, photon mapping, and bi-directional path tracing, which were originally designed to handle static scenes only.

Fast Final Gathering via Reverse Photon Mapping

“…We believe that there is space left for future work on global illumination algorithms that process global illumination information also in a coherent way. Further, we think that the algorithm can be extended for rendering animations in the spirit of recent techniques [TMD*04], which could bring additional speedup by up to one order of magnitude.…”

Temporally Coherent Adaptive Sampling for Imperfect Shadow Maps

“…In general these methods aim either to make the rendering more efficient by exploiting frame‐to‐frame coherence and/or to minimize the disturbing temporal artifacts usually perceived as flickering. The temporally coherent methods were surveyed by Tawara et al [TMD*04] in the context of offline rendering algorithms and more recently by Scherzer et al [SYM*12] in the context of real‐time rendering. Directly related to our work, Laine et al [LSK*07] presented a method that updates only a small part of all VPLs for subsequent frames.…”

Photon Differentials in Space and Time

“…A survey paper for global illumination and rendering solutions exploiting temporal coherence is given in [13].…”