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Real-Time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing (arxiv.org)
3 points by lnyan on Jun 24, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A small neural network learns the scene's lighting while rendering, storing light so the renderer skips long bounce chains even as the scene changes. Compared with plain path tracing, it cut noise with only slight error, adding about 2.6 milliseconds per full-HD frame.

Abstract · Real-time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing

We present a real-time neural radiance caching method for path-traced global illumination. Our system is designed to handle fully dynamic scenes, and makes no assumptions about the lighting, geometry, and materials. The data-driven nature of our approach sidesteps many difficulties of caching algorithms, such as locating, interpolating, and updating cache points. Since pretraining neural networks to handle novel, dynamic scenes is a formidable generalization challenge, we do away with pretraining and instead achieve generalization via adaptation, i.e. we opt for training the radiance cache while rendering. We employ self-training to provide low-noise training targets and simulate infinite-bounce transport by merely iterating few-bounce training updates. The updates and cache queries incur a mild overhead -- about 2.6ms on full HD resolution -- thanks to a streaming implementation of the neural network that fully exploits modern hardware. We demonstrate significant noise reduction at the cost of little induced bias, and report state-of-the-art, real-time performance on a number of challenging scenarios.

Thomas Müller, Fabrice Rousselle, Jan Novák, Alexander Keller
arXiv:2106.12372 · cs.GR, cs.LG · submitted Jun 23, 2021 · updated Jun 25, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · To appear at SIGGRAPH 2021. 16 pages, 16 figures

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