A hierarchical factorization method for efficient radiosity calculations

摘要

The radiosity problem can be expressed as a linear system, where light interactions between patches of the scene are considered. Its resolution has been one of the main subjects in Computer Graphics, which has led to the development of methods focused on different goals. For instance, in inverse lighting problems, it is convenient to solve the radiosity equation thousands of times for static geometries. Also, this calculation needs to consider many (or infinite) light bounces to achieve accurate global illumination results. Several methods have been developed to solve the linear system by finding approximations or other representations of the radiosity matrix, because the full storage of this matrix is memory demanding. Some examples are hierarchical radiosity, progressive refinement approaches, or wavelet radiosity, which may become slow for many bounces. Recently, new direct methods have been developed based on matrix factorization.