Hybrid diffusion method for global illumination of volumetric data

Abstract

In this paper, we present a hybrid diffusion method for the interactive illumination and rendering of volumetric data. The method is based on the convection-diffusion model, which describes the direct illumination with a convection process and scattering with a diffusion process. In our method, convection was replaced with path tracing. We evaluated both the performance of the implementation and the quality of the final images and compared them with the convection-diffusion method, path tracing with single scattering and path tracing with multiple scattering. Results show a similar performance and quality of images, rendered with our method, with respect to the convection-diffusion method, while our approach offers additional advantages, in particular unbiasedness, independence from the number of lights and lower memory requirements.