Global Illumination of large Scenes using Illumination-driven Geometry Adaptation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thorsten Grosch
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: from 2013 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228504856

Monte carlo methods are todays standard for physically correct global illumination simulations. Such a simulation can be computed despite the permanently growing scene size. Even out-of-core scenes are possible, but with a large time consumption for swapping geometry data in and out, although a large amount of parallel hardware is used.Therefore, this project aims for an illumination-driven geometry simplification of such an out-of-core scene which runs on a single machine with limited main memory. Given the current settings for camera, materials and light sources, the quality of the resulting lighting simulation should become optimal. The required geometry reduction process should therefore be integrated in the lighting simulation. The criterion for simplification of a region in the mesh should be the visible change in the illumination, which then leads to an adaptation of the level of detail of the mesh to the global illumination. This corresponds especially to regions which are not directly visible in the camera image, but contribute to the visible illumination indirectly. The goal of the project is to determine the best quality of a physically correct global illumination simulation, given a reduced amount of main memory. This project proposal is the continuation of the DFG project "Out-of-Core Global Illumination".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants