Modern Approaches to Global Illumination via Density Estimation

In this talk we show how biased methods based on density estimation of photon hits such as photon maps can be extended. Instead of using photon hits as in photon maps and combining them with final gathering we exploit the photon paths in two ways. First, we make density estimation in ray space of photon paths, which reduces bias. Second, we reverse the process of density estimation and splat energy of photons around the cones of photon paths. We show the results and timings of the image synthesis based on the two new methods and the differences to traditional photon mapping.