Lazy Decompression of Surface Light Fields for Precomputed Global Illumination

This paper describes a series of algorithms that allow the unconstrained walkthrough of static scenes shaded with the results of precomputed global illumination. The global illumination includes specular as well as diffuse terms, and intermediate results are cached as surface light fields. The compression of such light fields is examined, and a lazy decompression scheme is presented which allows for high-quality compression by making use of block-coding techniques. This scheme takes advantage of spatial coherence within the light field to aid compression, and also makes use of temporal coherence to accelerate decompression. Finally the techniques are extended to a certain type of dynamic scene.