Title
A theory of locally low dimensional light transport
Abstract
Blockwise or Clustered Principal Component Analysis (CPCA) is commonly used to achieve real-time rendering of shadows and glossy reflections with precomputed radiance transfer (PRT). The vertices or pixels are partitioned into smaller coherent regions, and light transport in each region is approximated by a locally low-dimensional subspace using PCA. Many earlier techniques such as surface light field and reflectance field compression use a similar paradigm. However, there has been no clear theoretical understanding of how light transport dimensionality increases with local patch size, nor of the optimal block size or number of clusters. In this paper, we develop a theory of locally low dimensional light transport, by using Szego's eigenvalue theorem to analytically derive the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix for canonical cases. We show mathematically that for symmetric patches of area A, the number of basis functions for glossy reflections increases linearly with A, while for simple cast shadows, it often increases as √A. These results are confirmed numerically on a number of test scenes. Next, we carry out an analysis of the cost of rendering, trading off local dimensionality and the number of patches, deriving an optimal block size. Based on this analysis, we provide useful practical insights for setting parameters in CPCA and also derive a new adaptive subdivision algorithm. Moreover, we show that rendering time scales sub-linearly with the resolution of the image, allowing for interactive all-frequency relighting of 1024 x 1024 images.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1275808.1276454
ACM Trans. Graph.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
covariance matrix,dimensional analysis,eigenvalues,real time rendering,light field,principal component analysis,cost analysis
Journal
26
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0730-0301
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.72
21
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dhruv K. Mahajan137822.92
Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman271028.03
Ravi Ramamoorthi34481237.21
Peter N. Belhumeur4122421001.27