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Adaptive undersampling for efficient mobile ray tracing

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Abstract

Aiming to develop an efficient ray tracer for a mobile platform, we present an adaptive undersampling method that enhances the rendering speed by effectively replacing expensive ray-tracing operations with cheap interpolation whenever possible. Our method explores both object- and image-space information gathered during ray tracing to detect possibly problematic pixels. Rays are fired only for these pixels. We also present a postcorrection algorithm that minimizes annoying artifacts inevitably caused by undersampling. Our implementation on a mobile GPU demonstrates that this method can speed up the rendering computation significantly, while retaining almost the same visual quality of the rendering.

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Acknowledgments

The test scenes are courtesy of I. Wald (Ben), J. Helenklaken (Kitchen), A. Grynberg and G. Ward (Conference), G. M. Leal Llaguno (San Miguel), and S. Laine and T. Karras (Hairball). This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. NRF-2015R1A2A2A01006590).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Youngwook Kim, Woong Seo & Insung Ihm

  2. NCSOFT, Seongnam, Republic of Korea

    Yongho Kim

  3. LG Electronics, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Yeongkyu Lim & Jae-Ho Nah

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  1. Youngwook Kim
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  2. Woong Seo
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  3. Yongho Kim
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  4. Yeongkyu Lim
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  5. Jae-Ho Nah
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  6. Insung Ihm
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Correspondence to Insung Ihm.

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Kim, Y., Seo, W., Kim, Y. et al. Adaptive undersampling for efficient mobile ray tracing. Vis Comput 32, 801–811 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-016-1251-y

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