Spectral domain decomposition method for physically-based rendering of photochromic/electrochromic glass windows

Abstract: This paper covers the time consuming issues intrinsic to physically-based image rendering algorithms. First, glass materials optical properties were measured on samples of real glasses and other objects materials inside an hotel room were characterized by deducing spectral data from multiple trichromatic images. We then present the rendering model and ray-tracing algorithm implemented in Virtuelium, an open source software. In order to accelerate the computation of the interactions between light rays and objects, the ray-tracing algorithm is parallelized by means of domain decomposition method techniques. Numerical experiments show that the speedups obtained with classical parallelization techniques are significantly less significant than those achieved with parallel domain decomposition methods.