A 5D Tree to Reduce the Variance of Monte Carlo Ray Tracing

Eric P. Lafortune and Yves D. Willems

Proceedings of the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, Dublin, Ireland (June 1995), pp. 11-20.

Published as: Rendering Techniques '95, P.M. Hanrahan, W. Purgathofer (editors), pp. 11-20.

In this paper we present a 5D tree structure to cache illumination information gained during Monte Carlo ray tracing. The structure is elegant and simple to use. It is adaptive and makes abstraction of the complexity of the input scene automatically.

We then show how the information in this structure can be used to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo process. Unlike previous approaches the techniques presented here do not introduce a bias in the results.

This paper is available on-line as a gzip'ed Postscript file (10 pages, 100 KBytes, expands to 283 KBytes).


Copyright © 1996-2016 Eric Lafortune.