Temporal Photon Differentials

The finite frame rate also used in computer animated films is cause of adverse temporal aliasing effects. Most noticeable of these is a stroboscopic effect that is seen as intermittent movement of fast moving illumination. This effect can be mitigated using non-zero shutter times, effectively, constituting a temporal smoothing of rapidly changing illumination.

In global illumination temporal smoothing can be achieved with distribution ray tracing (Cook et al., 1984). Unfortunately, this, and resembling methods, requires a high temporal resolution as samples has to be drawn from in-between frames. We present a novel method which is able to produce high quality temporal smoothing for indirect illumination without using in-between frames.

Our method is based on ray differentials (Igehy, 1999) as it has been extended in (Sporring et al., 2009). Light rays are traced as bundles creating footprints, which are used to reconstruct indirect illumination. These footprints expand into the temporal domain such that light rays interacting with non-static scene elements draw a path reacting to the elements movement.