SURE-based Optimization for Adaptive Sampling and Reconstruction

SURE-based Optimization for
Adaptive Sampling and Reconstruction

Tzu-Mao Li Yu-Ting Wu Yung-Yu Chuang
National Taiwan University

Comparisons between greedy error minimization (GEM) [Rousselle et al. 2011] and our SURE-based filtering. With SURE, we are able to use kernels (cross bilateral filters in this case) that are more effective than GEM's isotropic Gassians. Thus, our approach better adapts to anisotropic features (such as the motion blur pattern due to the motion of the airplane) and preserves scene details (such as the textures on the floor and curtains). The kernels of both methods are visualized for comparison.

Abstract
We apply Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator(SURE) to adaptive sampling and reconstruction to reduce noise in Monte Carlo rendering. SURE is a general unbiased estimator for mean squared error (MSE) in statistics. With SURE, we are able to estimate error for an arbitrary reconstruction kernel, enabling us to use more effective kernels rather than being restricted to the symmetric ones used in previous work. It also allows us to allocate more samples to areas with higher estimated MSE. Adaptive sampling and reconstruction can therefore be processed within an optimization framework. We also propose an efficient and memory-friendly approach to reduce the impact of noisy geometry features where there is depth of field or motion blur. Experiments show that our method produces images with less noise and crisper details than previous methods.

Publication
Tzu-Mao Li, Yu-Ting Wu, Yung-Yu Chuang.
SURE-based Optimization for Adaptive Sampling and Reconstruction.
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2012), volume 31, number 6, article 194, Singapore, November 2012. BibTeX
SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 paper (28.4MB PDF)
Digital library

Errata
Section 5.1:
The parameters should be "sigma_fk=0.8 for normal, sigma_fk=0.25 for texture color, sigma_fk=0.6 for depth".

Supplemental
SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 supplementary material (8.9MB PDF)
SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 presentation (13.4MB PPTX)
Web interactive comparison

Last Update: May 2021