An Analysis of the Photon Map
Ingo Wald, University of Saarbruecken
Dagstuhl, Germany, 2000/06/23
the photon map is a very powerful method for efficiently illuminating complex
environments.
However, violating the underlying reconstruction assumptions can lead
to visible artifacts. After analyzing
the reasons for these reconstruction artifacts, we present new techniques
for improving the photon map, namely a faster two-level approach for calculating
the radiance estimate, the use of multiple photon maps and two importance
sampling schemes for importance driven generation of photon maps and for
faster direct lighting calculation.