mitransient: Transient light transport in Mitsuba 3

TL;DR

mitransient extends Mitsuba 3 to enable fast, accurate, and easy-to-use time-resolved light transport simulations, facilitating research in transient imaging without specialized hardware.

Contribution

It introduces a Python-based, GPU-accelerated extension to Mitsuba 3 for transient light transport simulation, including polarization and differentiable rendering capabilities.

Findings

Supports complex materials and media like fog and smoke.

Enables realistic non-line-of-sight imaging simulations.

Runs efficiently on CPU and GPU with simple installation.

Abstract

mitransient is a light transport simulation tool that extends Mitsuba 3 with support for time-resolved simulations. In essence, mitransient extends conventional rendering by adding a temporal dimension which accounts for the time of flight of light. This allows rapid prototyping of novel transient imaging systems without the need of costly or difficult-to-operate hardware. Our code is trivially easy to install through pip, and consists of Python modules that can run both in CPU and GPU by leveraging the JIT capabilities of Mitsuba 3. It provides physically-based simulations of complex phenomena, including a wide variety of realistic materials and participating media such as fog or smoke. In addition, we extend Mitsuba 3's functionality to support time-resolved polarization tracking of light and transient differentiable rendering. Finally, we also include tools that simplify the use of our simulations for non-line-of-sight imaging, enabling realistic scene setups with capture noise to be simulated in just seconds of minutes. Altogether, we hope that mitransient will support the research community in developing novel algorithms for transient imaging.