• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.186-200
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• 2010

In order to render global illumination realistically, we need to accurately compute the direct and indirect illumination that represents the light information incoming through complex light paths. In this process, the indirect illumination at given point is greatly affected by surrounding geometries. Harmonic mean distance is a mathematical tool which is often used as a metric indicating the distance from a surface point to its visible objects in 3D space, and plays a key role in such advanced global illumination algorithms as irradiance/radiance caching and ambient occlusion. In this paper, we analyze the accuracy of harmonic mean distance estimated against various environments in the final gathering and photon mapping methods. Based on the experimental results, we discuss our experiences and future directions that may help develop an effective harmonic mean distance computation method in the future.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.31-46
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• 2008

The depth of field is the range that the objects inside of this range treated to be focused. Objects that are placed out of this range are out of focus and become blurred. In computer graphics, generating depth of field effects gives a great reality to rendered images. The previous researches on the depth of field in computer graphics can be divided into two major categories. One of them is the distributed ray tracing that samples the lens area against each pixel. It is possible to obtain precise results without noise if enough number of samples are taken. However, to make a good result, a great number of samples are needed, resulting in an enormous timing requirement. The other approach is the method that approximates depth of field effect by post-processing an image and its depth values computed using a pin-hole camera. Though the second technique is not that physically correct like distributed ray tracing, many approaches which using this idea have been introduced because it is much faster than the first approach. But the post-processing have some limitations because of the lack of ray information. In this paper, we first present an improvement technique that corrects the previous post-processing methods and then propose another one that accelerates the distributed ray tracing by using a radiance caching method.