State of the Art Report on Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion is a shading method which takes light occluded by geometry into account. Since this technique needs to integrate over a hemisphere it was first only used in offline rendering tools. However, the increasing resources of modern graphics hardware, enable us to render ambient occlusion in realtime. The goal of this report is to describe the most popular techniques with respect to realtime rendering. First we introduce how ambient occlusion is defined and then we will explain and categorize the presented techniques.

[1]  Kun Zhou,et al.  Precomputed shadow fields for dynamic scenes , 2005, ACM Trans. Graph..

[2]  Nicolas Holzschuch,et al.  Fast Precomputed Ambient Occlusion for Proximity Shadows , 2007, J. Graph. Tools.

[3]  Jan Kautz,et al.  Precomputed radiance transfer for real-time rendering in dynamic, low-frequency lighting environments , 2002 .

[4]  James F. O'Brien,et al.  Interpolating and approximating implicit surfaces from polygon soup , 2004, SIGGRAPH Courses.

[5]  Jiaoying Shi,et al.  Rendering with Spherical Radiance Transport Maps , 2004, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[6]  Timo Aila,et al.  Ambient occlusion for animated characters , 2006, EGSR '06.

[7]  Okan Arikan,et al.  Hardware accelerated ambient occlusion techniques on GPUs , 2007, SI3D.

[8]  David Levin,et al.  The approximation power of moving least-squares , 1998, Math. Comput..

[9]  Okan Arikan,et al.  Real-time ambient occlusion for dynamic character skins , 2007, SI3D.

[10]  Carol O'Sullivan,et al.  Sphere-tree construction using dynamic medial axis approximation , 2002, SCA '02.

[11]  Àlex Méndez-Feliu,et al.  Real-time obscurances with color bleeding , 2003, SCCG '03.

[12]  Kun Zhou,et al.  Variational sphere set approximation for solid objects , 2006, The Visual Computer.

[13]  Toby Howard,et al.  Rapid Shadow Generation in Real-World Lighting Environments , 2003, Rendering Techniques.

[14]  Samuli Laine,et al.  Ambient occlusion fields , 2005, I3D '05.

[15]  Jaakko Lehtinen,et al.  Hemispherical Rasterization for Self-Shadowing of Dynamic Objects , 2004, Rendering Techniques.

[16]  Gabriel Zachmann,et al.  Hardware-accelerated ambient occlusion computation , 2004, VMV.

[17]  Donald P. Greenberg,et al.  The hemi-cube: a radiosity solution for complex environments , 1985, SIGGRAPH.

[18]  Samir Akkouche,et al.  Simulating and modeling lichen growth , 2004, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[19]  Sergey Zhukov,et al.  An Ambient Light Illumination Model , 1998, Rendering Techniques.

[20]  Donald P. Greenberg,et al.  The Irradiance Volume , 1998, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.