Anton S. Kaplanyan Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany Path Space Regularization Framework

2 Motivation Why Photon Mapping / Vertex Merging is useful? Caustics/reflected caustics Helps sampling difficult transport paths Why is it not the ultimate technique? Slower convergence on diffuse High memory and b/w requirements Cache efficiency is unpredictable Can we have all pros and no cons? Handling difficult illumination No memory pressure Converges as fast as possible

3 Photon Mapping Cache (photon map) Merging (kernel estimation) Not discussed In this talk Selective, where required

4 Motivation

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7 Non-Sampleable Paths What if all edges of the path contain singularities? No place to perform a connection Impossible to sample with any unbiased sampling [Veach97] Example: Reflected caustics from point light (LSDSE)

8 Excursus: Undecidability of Ray Tracing Pure specular path tracing is undecidable [Reif et al. 1994] Task: Find all specular paths from one fixed point to another (DS + D) Impossible to find all such paths on a Turing machine Given arbitrary specular geometry

9 Non-Sampleable Paths, Part II What if all edges of the path contain singularities? No place to perform connection Impossible to sample with any unbiased sampling Example: Reflected caustics from point light (LSDSE) Reflected caustics: Two undecidable subpaths Such paths cannot be found precisely

10 Photon Mapping (a.k.a. Vertex Merging)

11 Photon Mapping: Under the Hood Photon mapping essentially regularizes specular interactions Regularization angle depends on the connection distance On-surface radius is fixed for a given point It is a known mathematical procedure…

12 Regularization with Mollification

13 Selective Regularization of Path Space Goal: Minimize bias. Why smoothing a regular path? Photon mapping causes uniform bias everywhere Regularize only non-sampleable paths! Only if all edges join a singularity Can only be detected once all interactions are known

14 Regularization Bandwidth Fix on-surface radius, as in photon mapping Convenient to control perceived bias Shoot a reflection ray to detect the distance Optimal bandwidth depends on light field around the path Requeres bias estimation Optimal bandwidth might depend on the goal / application E.g., regularize to sample all image features within given time

15 Reference Comparison of Different Methods

16 Path Tracing Comparison of Different Methods Regular paths

17 Comparison of Different Methods Bidirectional Path Tracing Regular paths

Noisy without cache?

19 Comparison of Different Methods Metropolis Light Transport Regular paths

20 Observations Ordinary MC methods (PT, BDPT, …) need efficient caching Markov chain Monte Carlo (MLT, …) resolves poor caching problem Inherent caching with the current path of Markov chain Regularization is simple to integrate into existing renderer

21 Observations Ordinary MC methods (PT, BDPT, …) need efficient caching Markov chain Monte Carlo (MLT, …) resolves poor caching problem Inherent caching with the current path of Markov chain Regularization is simple to integrate into existing renderer Path Tracer Path Tracer with Regularization

22 Consistency

23 Practical Convergence of MLT Powerful tool to temper the integrand “Improving Robustness of Monte-Carlo Global Illumination with Directional Regularization” brief today by G. Bouchard et al. Can achieve more uniform convergence with MLT MLT + Regularization, 1 minMLT, 1 minReference

24 Practical Convergence of MLT

25 Combination with Manifold Exploration Enables unbiased sampling of non-sampleable paths! Regularization provides local parameterization Manifold exploration explores the surrounding paths Avoids the undecidability By finding a local parameterization Undecidable paths are sampled “almost surely” Unbiased reflected caustics MLT+ME MLT+ME with Regularization

26 Conclusion Vertex merging = regularization in original directional domain Biased Less efficient without cache (photon map) with MC methods Easy to apply to any integration method Finer control over bias Useful for MLT Seed with regularized paths, find exact non-sampleable paths Bootstrap Markov chain mixing for practical rendering Future work How to select the regularization bandwidth? Where and when to regularize arbitrary interactions? Predictive and preview rendering

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