Exploiting Temporal Coherence in Global Illumination (an invited paper)

Producing high quality animations featuring rich object appearance and compelling lighting effects is very time consuming using traditional frame-by-frame rendering systems. In this paper we present a number of global illumination and rendering solutions that exploit temporal coherence in lighting distribution for subsequent frames to improve the computation performance and overall animation quality. Our strategy relies on extending into temporal domain well-known global illumination techniques such as density estimation photon tracing, photon mapping, and bi-directional path tracing, which were originally designed to handle static scenes only