ToF ReSTIR: Time-of-Flight Rendering with Spatio-temporal Reservoir Resampling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spatio-temporal reservoir resampling framework for efficient, interactive time-of-flight rendering that enforces physically valid optical paths, enabling real-time applications like imaging and navigation.

Contribution

It adapts ReSTIR principles to ToF rendering with a novel path-length-aware shift mapping that ensures physically valid light paths for improved efficiency.

Findings

Supports interactive frame rates for complex scenes

Enables accurate shape reconstruction and navigation

Significantly reduces computational cost of ToF rendering

Abstract

We present a novel spatio-temporal reuse framework for time-resolved light transport, enabling efficient Monte Carlo rendering of time-of-flight (ToF) phenomena such as time-gated imaging and transient light capture. Existing ToF rendering methods are computationally expensive, scale poorly to complex dynamic scenes, and are therefore unsuitable for applications with strict latency constraints. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from ReSTIR, a reuse-based technique for steady-state real-time rendering, and adapt its core principles to interactive-rate ToF simulation. However, naively applying existing ReSTIR methods to ToF rendering leads to severe inefficiency, as reused paths frequently violate optical path-length constraints and thus contribute little or no signal. We overcome this challenge by introducing a path reuse formulation that explicitly enforces physically valid optical path lengths. The key idea is path-length-aware shift mapping, a geometric transformation based on Newton's method that adjusts reused light paths to satisfy temporal gating constraints, inspired by specular manifold exploration in steady-state caustics rendering. The resulting framework substantially improves the efficiency of ToF rendering across a wide range of scenarios, including complex scenes with glossy or specular materials and dynamic motion. Our method supports both time-gated and transient rendering at interactive frame rates, enabling simulation under practical latency constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two downstream applications, including shape reconstruction and navigation.