Metropolis Instant Radiosity

Abstract

We present Metropolis Instant Radiosity (MIR), an unbiased algorithm to solve the Light Transport problem. MIR is a hybrid technique which consists in representing the incoming radiance field by a set of Virtual Point Lights (V PLs) and in computing the response of all sensors in the scene (i.e. camera captors) by accumulating their contributions. In contrast to other similar approaches, we propose to sample the VPLs with an innovative Multiple-try Metropolis-Hastings (MTMH) Algorithm: the goal is to build an efficient, aggressive, and unconditionally robust variance reduction method that works well regardless of the scene layout. Finally, we present a fast ray tracing implementation using MIR and show how our complete rendering pipeline can produce high-quality and high-resolution pictures in a few seconds.