Gaussian Light Transport

Abstract

We present a novel method for computing global illumination by expressing the solution to the light transport equation as a 13D Gaussian mixture model over positions, directions, surface normals, and material properties. We show that including scene properties in the Gaussian representation drastically reduces the number of functions and speeds up evaluation. As opposed to traditional light transport methods based on Neumann series, the parameters of our model are directly estimated by minimizing the residual of the rendering equation. While both optimization and rendering require repeated evaluations of a linear combination of high-dimensional Gaussian functions, we introduce an efficient culling strategy to keep the optimization tractable and produce renderings in real time. Our representation enables to render fast, view-independent solutions to the light transport equation, achieving rendering times on the order of milliseconds, with a fraction of the memory requirements of conventional neural rendering approaches.