[IPOL announce] new article: Accelerating Monte Carlo Renderers by Ray Histogram Fusion

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: http://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2015/119/

Mauricio Delbracio, Pablo Musé, Antoni Buades, and Jean-Michel Morel,
Accelerating Monte Carlo Renderers by Ray Histogram Fusion,
Image Processing On Line, 5 (2015), pp. 55–72.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2015.119

Abstract
This paper details the recently introduced Ray Histogram Fusion (RHF) 
filter for accelerating Monte Carlo renderers [M. Delbracio et al., 
Boosting Monte Carlo Rendering by Ray Histogram Fusion, ACM Transactions 
on Graphics, 33 (2014)]. In this filter, each pixel in the image is 
characterized by the colors of the rays that reach its surface. Pixels 
are compared using a statistical distance on the associated ray color 
distributions. Based on this distance, it decides whether two pixels can 
share their rays or not. The RHF filter is consistent: as the number of 
samples increases, more evidence is required to average two pixels. The 
algorithm provides a significant gain in PSNR, or equivalently 
accelerates the rendering process by using many fewer Monte Carlo 
samples without observable bias. Since the RHF filter depends only on 
the Monte Carlo samples color values, it can be naturally combined with 
all rendering effects.