Sampling procedural shaders using affine arithmetic

Procedural shaders have become popular tools for describing surface reflectance functions and other material properties. In comparison to fixed resolution textures, they have the advantage of being resolution-independent and storage-efficient. While procedural shaders provide an interface for evaluating the shader at a single point, it is not easily possible to obtain an average value of the shader together with accurate error bounds over a finite area. Yet the ability to compute such error bounds is crucial for several interesting applications, most notably heirarchical area sampling for global illumination, using the finite element approach, and for generation of textures used in interactive computer graphics. Using affine arithmetic for evaluating the shader over a finite area yields a tight, conservative error interval for the shader function. Compilers can automatically generate code for utilizing affine arithmetic from within shaders implemented in a dedicated language such as the RenderMann shading language.