high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Realistic images can be rendered by simulating light transport with Monte Carlo methods. The possibility to use realistic light sources for synthesizing images greatly contributes to their physical realism. Among existing models, the ones based on environment maps and light fields are attractive due to their ability to capture faithfully the far-field and near-field effects as well as their possibility of being acquired directly. Since acquired light sources have arbitrary frequencies and possibly high dimension (4D), using such light sources for realistic rendering leads to performance problems. In this thesis, I focus on how to balance the accuracy of the representation and the efficiency of the simulation. The work relies on generating high quality samples from the input light sources for unbiased Monte Carlo estimation. I introduce new sampling techniques for physically-based rendering with time-varying environment lighting and light field light sources. The results show that physically accurate rendering with realistic light sources can be achieved in real time.