Neural Bloom: A Deep Learning Approach to Real-Time Lighting

Abstract: We propose a novel method to generate bloom lighting effect in real time using neural networks. Our solution generate brightness mask from given 3D scene view up to 30% faster than state-of-the-art methods. The existing traditional techniques rely on multiple blur appliances and texture sampling, also very often have existing conditional branching in its implementation. These operations occupy big portion of the execution time. We solve this problem by proposing two neural network-based bloom lighting methods, Neural Bloom Lighting (NBL) and Fast Neural Bloom Lighting (FastNBL), focusing on their quality and performance. Both methods were tested on a variety of 3D scenes, with evaluations conducted on brightness mask accuracy and inference speed. The main contribution of this work is that both methods produce high-quality bloom effects while outperforming the standard state-of-the-art bloom implementation, with FastNBL being faster by 28% and NBL faster by 12%. These findings highlight that we can achieve realistic bloom lighting phenomena faster, moving us towards more realism in real-time environments in the future. This improvement saves computational resources, which is a major bottleneck in real-time rendering. Furthermore, it is crucial for sustaining immersion and ensuring smooth experiences in high FPS environments, while maintaining high-quality realism.