Publications related to Photon mapping

Aggregating Spatial and Photometric Context for Photometric Stereo

Photometric stereo, a computer vision technique for estimating the 3D shape of objects through images captured under varying illumination conditions, has been a topic of research for nearly four decades. In its general formulation, photometric stereo is an ...

EPFL2024

Automatic Parameterization for Aerodynamic Shape Optimization via Deep Geometric Learning

Pascal Fua, Zhen Wei

We propose two deep learning models that fully automate shape parameterization for aerodynamic shape optimization. Both models are optimized to parameterize via deep geometric learning to embed human prior knowledge into learned geometric patterns, elimina ...

2023

A Full-Wave Reference Simulator for Computing Surface Reflectance

Mengqi Xia

Computing light reflection from rough surfaces is an important topic in computer graphics. Reflection models developed based on geometric optics fail to capture wave effects such as diffraction and interference, while existing models based on physical opti ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Differentiable Signed Distance Function Rendering

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Delio Aleardo Vicini, Sébastien Nicolas Speierer

Physically-based differentiable rendering has recently emerged as an attractive new technique for solving inverse problems that recover complete 3D scene representations from images. The inversion of shape parameters is of particular interest but also pose ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Modeling specular transmission of complex fenestration systems with data-driven BSDFs

Jan Wienold

A Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSDF) describes how light from each incident direction is scattered (reflected and transmitted) by a simple or composite surface, such as a window shade. Compact, tabular BSDFs may be derived via interpolat ...

2021

Light Path Gradients for Forward and Inverse Rendering

Tizian Lucien Zeltner

Physically based rendering is a process for photorealistic digital image synthesis and one of the core problems in computer graphics. It involves simulating the light transport, i.e. the emission, propagation, and scattering of light through a virtual scen ...

EPFL2021

Leveraging Spatial and Photometric Context for Calibrated Non-Lambertian Photometric Stereo

Pascal Fua, Engin Türetken, David Honzátko

The problem of estimating a surface shape from its observed reflectance properties still remains a challenging task in computer vision. The presence of global illumination effects such as inter-reflections or cast shadows makes the task particularly diffic ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2021

Practical Product Path Guiding Using Linearly Transformed Cosines

Wenzel Alban Jakob

Path tracing is now the standard method used to generate realistic imagery in many domains, e.g., film, special effects, architecture etc. Path guiding has recently emerged as a powerful strategy to counter the notoriously long computation times required t ...

WILEY2020

Specular Manifold Sampling for Rendering High-Frequency Caustics and Glints

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Tizian Lucien Zeltner

Scattering from specular surfaces produces complex optical effects that are frequently encountered in realistic scenes: intricate caustics due to focused reflection, multiple refraction, and high-frequency glints from specular microstructure. Yet, despite ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Image-Based Acquisition and Modeling of Polarimetric Reflectance

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Tizian Lucien Zeltner, Xin Tong

Realistic modeling of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of scene objects is a vital prerequisite for any type of physically based rendering. In the last decades, the availability of databases containing real-world material measurem ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Very massive tracers and higher derivative biases

Most of the upcoming cosmological information will come from analyzing the clustering of the Large Scale Structures (LSS) of the universe through LSS or CMB observations. It is therefore essential to be able to understand their behavior with exquisite prec ...

2020

A Learned Shape-Adaptive Subsurface Scattering Model

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Delio Aleardo Vicini

Subsurface scattering, in which light refracts into a translucent material to interact with its interior, is the dominant mode of light transport in many types of organic materials. Accounting for this phenomenon is thus crucial for visual realism, but exp ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

Automated Daylighting Control System based on Sky Luminance Monitoring and Lighting Computing

Yujie Wu

Sufficient daylight exposure contributes to occupants' productivity and health in buildings. However, excessive daylight ingress induces discomfort glare and increases the cooling load in warm seasons. The performance of manual shading systems is limited b ...

EPFL2019

Spatial coherence properties of an LED-based illumination system for mask-aligner lithography

Hans Peter Herzig, Toralf Scharf, Wilfried Noell, Raoul Kirner, Johana Bernasconi

A high-power LED-based illumination system has been developed as a replacement for the mercury arc lamps used in mask-aligner lithography. LEDs are arranged in a grid array and placed in the entrance aperture of individual reflectors. Those reflectors decr ...

SPIE2019

Neural BTF Compression and Interpolation

Wenzel Alban Jakob

The Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) is a data-driven solution to render materials with complex appearance. A typical capture contains tens of thousands of images of a material sample under varying viewing and lighting conditions. While capable of fait ...

WILEY2019

Mitsuba 2: A Retargetable Forward and Inverse Renderer

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Tizian Lucien Zeltner, Delio Aleardo Vicini, Merlin Eléazar Nimier-David

Modern rendering systems are confronted with a dauntingly large and growing set of requirements: in their pursuit of realism, physically based techniques must increasingly account for intricate properties of light, such as its spectral composition or polar ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2019

An Adaptive Parameterization for Efficient Material Acquisition and Rendering

Wenzel Alban Jakob

One of the key ingredients of any physically based rendering system is a detailed specification characterizing the interaction of light and matter of all materials present in a scene, typically via the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

An Adaptive Parameterization for Efficient Material Acquisition and Rendering

Wenzel Alban Jakob

One of the key ingredients of any physically based rendering system is a detailed specification characterizing the interaction of light and matter of all materials present in a scene, typically via the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

Sampling the Multiple Facets of Light

Gilles Baechler

The theme of this thesis revolves around three important manifestations of light, namely its corpuscular, wave and electromagnetic nature. Our goal is to exploit these principles to analyze, design and build imaging modalities by developing new signal proc ...

EPFL2018

Sampling and Exact Reconstruction of Pulses with Variable Width

Martin Vetterli, Adam James Scholefield, Loïc Arnaud Baboulaz, Gilles Baechler

Recent sampling results enable the reconstruction of signals composed of streams of fixed-shaped pulses. These results have found applications in topics as varied as channel estimation, biomedical imaging and radio astronomy. However, in many real signals, ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2017