A Generic Framework for Physical Light Transport

Shlomi Steinberg
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2021)

Publication date: July 19th, 2021
doi: 10.1145/3450626.3459791

The ability of a light beam to produce observable wave interference phenomena evolves globally: A small but powerful white LED source (marked by a yellow circle) illuminates a scene. The light falls upon the head of a desk lamp made of brushed aluminum, however (a) no diffractive effects are visible because the lamp is close to the source. The light beam is then incident upon a Venus de Milo statue made of scratched bronze. The illumination of the upper part of the statue is dominated by direct incident light, and (b) visible interference patterns arise. On the other hand, light reaching the lower parts of the statue is diffused by a large decorative vase filled with water, altering the coherence properties of the light and (c) diminishing the observable diffraction effects. Rendering is done using a bi-directional path tracer that propagates coherence information, under our formalism, from the light sources.

Abstract

Cite

@article{Steinberg_Physical_Light_Transport_Framework_2021,
 	title={A generic framework for physical light transport},
 	volume={40},
 	url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3450626.3459791},
 	DOI={10.1145/3450626.3459791},
 	number={4},
 	journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics},
 	publisher={Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)},
 	author={Steinberg, Shlomi and Yan, Ling-Qi},
 	year={2021},
 	month={Aug},
 	pages={1–20}
 }