Adaptive Matrix Completion for Fast Visibility Computations with Many Lights Rendering

Abstract

AbstractSeveral fast global illumination algorithms rely on the Virtual Point Lights framework. This framework separates illumination into two steps: first, propagate radiance in the scene and store it in virtual lights, then gather illumination from these virtual lights. To accelerate the second step, virtual lights and receiving points are grouped hierarchically, for example using Multi‐Dimensional Lightcuts. Computing visibility between clusters of virtual lights and receiving points is a bottleneck. Separately, matrix completion algorithms reconstruct completely a low‐rank matrix from an incomplete set of sampled elements. In this paper, we use adaptive matrix completion to approximate visibility information after an initial clustering step. We reconstruct visibility information using as little as 10 % to 20 % samples for most scenes, and combine it with shading information computed separately, in parallel on the GPU. Overall, our method computes global illumination 3 or more times faster than previous state‐of‐the‐art methods.