Spectral domain decomposition method for physically-based rendering of photochromic/electrochromic glass windows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spectral domain decomposition method to improve the efficiency of physically-based rendering of photochromic and electrochromic glass windows, combining spectral data measurement and parallelized ray-tracing.

Contribution

It presents a novel spectral domain decomposition approach and its implementation in an open source renderer, significantly accelerating rendering computations.

Findings

Spectral data measured from real glass samples.

Parallel domain decomposition yields greater speedups than classical methods.

Implementation in Virtuelium demonstrates practical efficiency improvements.

Abstract

This paper covers the time consuming issues intrinsic to physically-based image rendering algorithms. First, glass materials optical properties were measured on samples of real glasses and other objects materials inside an hotel room were characterized by deducing spectral data from multiple trichromatic images. We then present the rendering model and ray-tracing algorithm implemented in Virtuelium, an open source software. In order to accelerate the computation of the interactions between light rays and objects, the ray-tracing algorithm is parallelized by means of domain decomposition method techniques. Numerical experiments show that the speedups obtained with classical parallelization techniques are significantly less significant than those achieved with parallel domain decomposition methods.