Description and Solution of an Unreported Intrinsic Bias in Photon Mapping Density Estimation with Constant Kernel

This paper presents an analysis of the irradiance estimator often used in photon mapping algorithms and concludes that the classical approach with a constant kernel overestimates the correct value. We propose a new estimator that solves this problem and provide both theoretical and empirical studies to verify it.

[1]  Werner Purgathofer,et al.  Advanced Radiance Estimation For Photon Map Global Illumination , 2002, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[2]  B. Silverman.  Density estimation for statistics and data analysis , 1986 .

[3]  Per H. Christensen,et al.  Efficient simulation of light transport in scenes with participating media using photon maps , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[4]  Matthias Zwicker,et al.  The Beam Radiance Estimate for Volumetric Photon Mapping , 2008, SIGGRAPH '08.

[5]  M. Lastra,et al.  A Density Estimation Technique for Radiosity , 2002 .

[6]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Ray maps for global illumination , 2004, SIGGRAPH '04.

[7]  H. N. Nagaraja,et al.  Order Statistics, Third Edition , 2005, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics.

[8]  Bernard W. Silverman,et al.  Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis , 1987 .

[9]  Donald P. Greenberg,et al.  Density Estimation Techniques fro Global Illumination , 1998 .

[10]  Henrik Wann Jensen,et al.  Global Illumination using Photon Maps , 1996, Rendering Techniques.

[11]  László Neumann,et al.  Photon Map Gathering on the GPU , 2005, Eurographics.

[12]  M. LastraandC.  A Particle-Path based Method for Monte Carlo Density Estimation , 2002 .

[13]  Guenter Enderle,et al.  Bias Compensation for Photon Maps , 1985 .

[14]  Roland Schregle,et al.  Bias Compensation for Photon Maps , 2003, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[15]  H. Jensen.  Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping , 2001 .

[16]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Global Illumination using Photon Ray Splatting , 2007, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[17]  Donald P. Greenberg,et al.  Global illumination using local linear density estimation , 1997, TOGS.