Abstract
Rendering applications in design, manufacturing, ecommerce and other fields are used to simulate the appearance of objects and scenes. Fidelity with respect to appearance is often critical, and calculating global illumination (GI) is an important contributor to image fidelity; but it is expensive to compute.
GI approximation methods, such as virtual point light (VPL) algorithms, are efficient, but they can induce image artifacts and distortions of object appearance. In this paper we systematically study the perceptual effects on image quality and material appearance of global illumination approximations made by VPL algorithms.
In a series of psychophysical experiments we investigate the relationships between rendering parameters, object properties and image fidelity in a VPL renderer. ...