State of the art in photon density estimation
Toshiya Hachisuka, Wojciech Jarosz, Iliyan Georgiev, Anton Kaplanyan, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Ben F. Spencer · 2013
Photon density estimation techniques are a popular choice for simulating light transport in scenes with complicated geometry and materials. This class of algorithms can be used to accurately simulate inter-reflections, caustics, color bleeding, scattering in participating media and subsurface scattering. Since its introduction, photon density estimation has been significantly extended in computer graphics with the introduction of: specialized techniques that intelligently modify the positions or bandwidths to reduce visual error using a small number of photons, approaches which eliminates error completely in the limit, methods that use higher-order samples and queries to reduce error in participating media, and recent generalized formulations that bridge the gap between photon density estimation and other techniques.