Fast lossy compression of 3D unit vector sets
Sylvain Rousseau, Tamy Boubekeur · 2017
We propose a new efficient ray compression method to be used prior to transmission in a distributed Monte Carlo rendering engine. In particular, we introduce a new compression scheme for unorganized unit vector sets (ray directions) which, combined with state-of-the-art positional compression (ray origin), provides a significant gain in precision compared to classical ray quantization techniques. Given a ray set which directions lie in a subset of the Gauss sphere, our key idea consists in mapping it to the surface of the whole unit sphere, for which collaborative compression achieves a high signal-over-noise ratio. As a result, the rendering engine can distribute efficiently massive ray waves over large heterogeneous networks, with potentially low bandwidth. This opens a way toward Monte Carlo rendering in cloud computing, without the need to access specialized hardware such as rendering farms, to harvest the latent horsepower present in public institutions or companies.