Fast 4D Sheared Filtering for Interactive Rendering of Distribution Effects
Ling-Qi Yan, Soham Uday Mehta, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Fredo Durand
In ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 35(1), December 2015.
Abstract: Soft shadows, depth of field, and diffuse global illumination are common distribution effects, usually rendered by Monte Carlo ray tracing. Physically correct, noise-free images can require hundreds or thousands of ray samples per pixel, and take a long time to compute. Recent approaches have exploited sparse sampling and filtering; the filtering is either fast (axis-aligned), but requires more input samples, or needs fewer input samples but is very slow (sheared). We present a new approach for fast sheared filtering on the GPU. Our algorithm factors the 4D sheared filter into four 1D filters. We derive complexity bounds for our method, showing that the per-pixel complexity is reduced from O(n2 l2) to O(nl), where n is the linear filter width (filter size is O(n2)) and l is the (usually very small) number of samples for each dimension of the light or lens per pixel (spp is l2). We thus reduce sheared filtering overhead dramatically. We demonstrate rendering of depth of field, soft shadows and diffuse global illumination at interactive speeds. We reduce the number of samples needed by 5-8×, compared to axis-aligned filtering, and framerates are 4× faster for equal quality.
Article URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2816814
BibTeX format:
@article{10.1145-2816814,
  author = {Ling-Qi Yan and Soham Uday Mehta and Ravi Ramamoorthi and Fredo Durand},
  title = {Fast 4D Sheared Filtering for Interactive Rendering of Distribution Effects},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
  volume = {35},
  number = {1},
  articleno = {7},
  month = dec,
  year = {2015},
}
Search for more articles by Ling-Qi Yan.
Search for more articles by Soham Uday Mehta.
Search for more articles by Ravi Ramamoorthi.
Search for more articles by Fredo Durand.

Return to the search page.


graphbib: Powered by "bibsql" and "SQLite3."