Graphics Interface 2015 – Best Student Paper

Thomas Kroes, Martin Eisemann, Elmar Eisemann – TU Delft; “Visibility Sweeps for Joint-Hierarchical Importance Sampling of Direct Lighting for Stochastic Volume Rendering“; Physically-based light transport in heterogeneous volumetric data is computationally expensive because the rendering integral (particularly visibility) has to be stochastically solved. We present a visibility estimation method in concert with an importance-sampling technique for efficient and unbiased stochastic volume rendering. Our solution relies on a joint strategy, which involves the environmental illumination and visibility inside of the volume. A major contribution of our method is a fast sweeping-plane algorithm to progressively estimate partial occlusions at discrete locations, where we
store the result using an octahedral representation.(PDF)