Photon-Mapping Based High-Quality Real-Time Global Illumination for Static Scenes

Photon mapping is one of the most frequently applied rendering methods for generating global illumination effects. While the image quality improves as more photons are emitted during rendering, the requirement for the computation time and memory space increases proportionally to the number of used photons. This paper presents a global illumination technique suitable for ray-tracing a static scene with fixed geometry and lights, which effectively handles the dynamic camera motion while using enoughly many photons for producing high-quality rendering images. In addition, we suggest an efficient technique that considerably reduces the cost for tracing shadow rays by storing shadow visibility information into the static scene and exploiting it during rendering. Combining such efforts, we demonstrate that high-quality global illumination including the intractable diffuse inter-reflection between objects can be effectively produced for static scenes only at the expense of basic recursive ray tracing.