Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

Talk by Joshua Steinhurst, UNC - Chapel Hill

Practical Photon Mapping in Hardware
Thursday, March 30 2006
4:30pm in Science Center 240

Abstract

A primary goal of computer graphics is to generate images indistinguishable from those taken in the real world. Achieving such realism requires an accurate simulation of the physical interactions of light with the scene. Images of this quality are now prevalent in computer-generated movies, but require hours of computation for each frame of the movie. Many applications, however, such as flight simulators and video games are interactive, and must generate tens of new images every second.

Photon mapping is a popular algorithm that is able support many realistic lighting effects such as indirect illumination. Although it is more efficient than the comparable alternatives, it does require significantly more memory bandwidth than is feasible in interactive systems. After an introduction to computer graphics, global illumination, and photon mapping we'll examine two novel techniques that make the interactive generation of images using a photon map feasible. This talk has been designed to be accessible to those with a general background in computer science; knowledge of computer graphics is not assumed.