Light Transport Simulation via Generalized Multiple Importance Sampling

Abstract: Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is employed to reduce variance of estimators, but when sampling and weighting are not suitable to the integrand, the estimators would have extra variance. Therefore, robust light transport simulation algorithms based on Monte Carlo sampling for different types of scenes are still uncompleted. In this paper, we address this problem by present a general method, named generalized multiple importance sampling (GMIS), to enhance the robustness of light transport simulation based on MIS. GMIS combines different sampling techniques and weighting functions, extending MIS to a more generalized framework. Meanwhile, we implement the GMIS in common renderers and illustrate how it increase the robustness of light transport simulation. Experiments show that, by applying GMIS, we obtain better convergence performance and lower variance, and increase the rendering of ambient light and specular shadow effects apparently.