Seminar 24/11 – Towards a path metric for path-space rendering and compositing

For the STORM seminar on Friday 24/11, Mathias Paulin will give us a talk entitled Towards a path metric for path-space rendering and compositing.

Abstract
Monte Carlo methods for solving the so called path-space light transport formulation are nowadays the most useful rendering techniques. Their ability to render general and physically correct lighting effects with no user interaction is one of the main reason the movie industry tend to generalize their usage for production.
Nevertheless, beyond the numerous advantages of these methods, several difficulties arise when searching to minimize the computational time to render a picture or when trying to transform the rendered picture according to some artistic goals.

After a brief recall of path-space light transport formulation and Monte Carlo method, we will discuss about the needs of light paths classification for image compositing and how one can automatically decompose an image into several layers that will define the compositing building blocks.
We will then discuss about the adaptation of the Damerau–Levenshtein distance to the computation of the similarity between light paths.