, Russian Federation
, Russian Federation
BISAC MAT036000 Combinatorics
A widely used method for noise reduction in Monte-Carlo ray tracing is combing different means of sampling, known as multiple importance sampling (MIS). For bi-directional Monte-Carlo ray tracing with photon maps (BDPM), the join paths are obtained by merging camera and light sub-paths, and since several light paths are checked again the same camera path, and vice versa, the join paths obtained are not statistically independent. Thus the noise in this method obeys laws different from those in simple classic Monte-Carlo with independent samples so the weights that minimize that noise must also be calculated differently. This paper drives that weights for the simplest case when we mix contribution from only two vertices of camera ray. It shows that the weights obey an integral equation which is qualitatively different from the well-known MIS formulae for uncorrelated samples. Besides that, even if forget the integral operator, the weights depend on the integration sphere radius and the number of light rays used. The integral equation is solved analytically in a closed form and it is demonstrated how to perform the necessary calculations in BDPM.
Monte-Carlo ray tracing, bi-directional ray tracing, photon maps, reduction of noise, multiple importance sampling, weights
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