Metropolis Photon Sampling with Optional User Guidance
We present Metropolis Photon Sampling (MPS), a visual importance-driven algorithm for populating photon
maps. Photon Mapping and other particle tracing algorithms fail if the photons are poorly distributed. Our approach
samples light transport paths that join a light to the eye, which accounts for the viewer in the sampling
process and provides information to improve photon storage. Paths are sampled with a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm
that exploits coherence among important light paths. We also present a technique for including user selected
paths in the sampling process without introducing bias. This allows a user to provide hints about important paths
or reduce variance in specific parts of the image. We demonstrate MPS with a range of scenes and show quantitative
improvements in error over standard Photon Mapping and Metropolis Light Transport.
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BibTex references
@InProceedings{FCL05, author = "Fan, Shaohua and Chenney, Stephen and Lai, Yu-Chi", title = "Metropolis Photon Sampling with Optional User Guidance", booktitle = "Proceedings of EGSR 2006", month = "jun", year = "2005", url = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2005/FCL05" }