Browsing by Author "Ostromoukhov, Victor"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Analysis of Sample Correlations for Monte Carlo Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Singh, Gurprit; Öztireli, Cengiz; Ahmed, Abdalla G. M.; Coeurjolly, David; Subr, Kartic; Deussen, Oliver; Ostromoukhov, Victor; Ramamoorthi, Ravi; Jarosz, Wojciech; Giachetti, Andrea and Rushmeyer, Holly
    Modern physically based rendering techniques critically depend on approximating integrals of high dimensional functions representing radiant light energy. Monte Carlo based integrators are the choice for complex scenes and effects. These integrators work by sampling the integrand at sample point locations. The distribution of these sample points determines convergence rates and noise in the final renderings. The characteristics of such distributions can be uniquely represented in terms of correlations of sampling point locations. Hence, it is essential to study these correlations to understand and adapt sample distributions for low error in integral approximation. In this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive and accessible overview of the techniques developed over the last decades to analyze such correlations, relate them to error in integrators, and understand when and how to use existing sampling algorithms for effective rendering workflows.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Fourier Analysis of Correlated Monte Carlo Importance Sampling
    (© 2020 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2020) Singh, Gurprit; Subr, Kartic; Coeurjolly, David; Ostromoukhov, Victor; Jarosz, Wojciech; Benes, Bedrich and Hauser, Helwig
    Fourier analysis is gaining popularity in image synthesis as a tool for the analysis of error in Monte Carlo (MC) integration. Still, existing tools are only able to analyse convergence under simplifying assumptions (such as randomized shifts) which are not applied in practice during rendering. We reformulate the expressions for bias and variance of sampling‐based integrators to unify non‐uniform sample distributions [importance sampling (IS)] as well as correlations between samples while respecting finite sampling domains. Our unified formulation hints at fundamental limitations of Fourier‐based tools in performing variance analysis for MC integration. At the same time, it reveals that, when combined with correlated sampling, IS can impact convergence rate by introducing or inhibiting discontinuities in the integrand. We demonstrate that the convergence of multiple importance sampling (MIS) is determined by the strategy which converges slowest and propose several simple approaches to overcome this limitation. We show that smoothing light boundaries (as commonly done in production to reduce variance) can improve (M)IS convergence (at a cost of introducing a small amount of bias) since it removes discontinuities within the integration domain. We also propose practical integrand‐ and sample‐mirroring approaches which cancel the impact of boundary discontinuities on the convergence rate of estimators.