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Abstract:
Computing global illumination (GI) in virtual scenes becomes increasingly
attractive even for real-time applications nowadays. GI delivers important cues
in the perception of 3D virtual scenes, which is important for material and
architectural design. Therefore, for photo-realistic rendering in the design
and even the game industry, GI has become indispensable. While the computer
simulation of realistic global lighting is well-studied and often considered as
solved, computing it efficiently is not. Saving computation costs is therefore
the main motivation of current research in GI. Efficient algorithms have to
take various aspects into account, such as the algorithmic complexity and
convergence, its mapping to parallel processing hardware, and the knowledge of
certain lighting properties including the capabilities of the human visual
system.
In this dissertation we exploit both low-level and high-level coherence in the
practical design of GI algorithms for a variety of target applications ranging
from high-quality production rendering to dynamic real-time rendering. We also
focus on automatic rendering-accuracy control to approximate GI in such a way
that the error is perceptually unified in the result images, thereby taking
not only into account the limitations of the human visual system but also later
video compression with an MPEG encoder. In addition, this dissertation provides
many ideas and supplementary material, which complements published work and
could be of practical relevance.
