Novel accelerated Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping rendering with neural network

Abstract

Recently, deep learning-based approaches have led to dramatic improvements for Monte Carlo rendering at the low sampling rate. Most of these approaches are aimed at path tracing. However, they are not suitable for photon mapping. In this paper, we develop a novel accelerate stochastic progressive photon mapping approaches with neural network. First, our framework utilizes the particle-based rendering and focuses on photon density estimation. We train a neural network to predict a kernel function to aggregate photon contributions at shading point. Then we construct a estimation images with the prediction network. During experiments, we could find that there are spike pixels and noises in estimation images sometimes. So we present the improved denoising network to post-process the estimation images. Finally, we can obtain the high-quality reconstructions of complex global illumination effects like caustics with an order of magnitude fewer photons compared with previous photon mapping methods. Besides, our denoising network can reduce most multi-scale noises on both low-frequency and high-frequency areas while preserving more illumination details, especially caustics, compared with other state-of-the-art learning-based denoising methods.