Anisotropic progressive photon mapping

Abstract

Progressive photon mapping solves the memory limitation problem of traditional photon mapping. It gives the correct radiance with a large passes, but it converges slowly. We propose an anisotropic progressive photon mapping method to generate high quality images with a few passes. During the rendering process, different from standard progressive photon mapping, we store the photons on the surfaces. At the end of each pass, an anisotropic method is employed to compute the radiance of each eye ray based on the stored photons. Before move to a new pass, the photons in the scene are cleared. The experiments show that our method generates better results than the standard progressive photon mapping in both numerical and visual qualities.