Abstract
Global illumination is a extremely important field in computer graphics in that it
provides a means by which to generate more convincing scenes and images. Many
global illumination algorithms are based on path tracing and/or ray tracing and are
primarily run by the central processing unit. As consumer graphics processing unit
(GPU) hardware has evolved many of these algorithms have been ported to the
GPU. The ports, while facilitating a speedup, do not make full use of rasterisation
hardware. Our algorithm, photon imaging, is designed to be a rasterisation based
global illumination algorithm which has native GPU data structures in order to
better utilise consumer GPU hardware.
Keywords: Global illumination, photon mapping, progressive photon mapping,
progressive global illumination, depth peeling, texture projection, rasterisation.