Interactive Global Illumination in Dynamic Participating Media Using Selective Photon Tracing

Tremendous progress in the development and accessibility of high dynamic range (HDR) technology that has happened just recently results in fast proliferation of HDR synthetic image sequences and captured HDR video. When properly processed, such HDR data can lead to very convincing and realistic results even when presented on traditional low dynamic range (LDR) display devices. This requires real-time local contrast compression (tone mapping) with simultaneous modeling of important in HDR image perception effects such as visual acuity, glare, day and night vision. We propose a unified model to include all those effects into a common computational framework, which enables an efficient implementation on currently available graphics hardware. We develop a post processing module which can be added as the final stage of any real-time rendering system, game engine, or digital video player, which enhances the realism and believability of displayed image streams