Next Event Backtracking

Abstract: In light transport simulation, challenging situations are caused by the variety of materials and the relative length of path segments. Path Tracing can handle many situations and scales well to parallel hardware. However, it is not able to produce paths which have a smooth surface in connection with a small light source. Here, photon transports perform superior, which can be ineffective if the smooth object is small compared to the scene size. We propose to use the last segment of a Path Tracer path as the first segment of a photon path. As a result, the strengths of next event estimation are inherited by the photon transport and photons are guided toward the regions where they are most useful. To that end, we developed a lock-free sparse octree, which we use for fast and robust density estimates. Summarizing, the new method can outperform state of the art algorithms like Vertex Connection and Merging in certain scenarios.