Efficient global illumination for dynamic scenes

The production of high quality animations which feature compelling lighting effects is computationally a very heavy task when traditional rendering approaches are used where each frame is computed separately. The fact that most of the computation must be restarted from scratch for each frame leads to unnecessary redundancy. Since temporal coherence is typically not exploited, temporal aliasing problems are also more difficult to address. Many small errors in lighting distribution cannot be perceived by human observers when they are coherent in temporal domain. However, when such a coherence is lost, the resulting animations suffer from unpleasant flickering effects. In this thesis, we propose global illumination and rendering algorithms, which are designed specifically to combat those problems. We achieve this goal by exploiting temporal coherence in the lighting distribution between the subsequent animation frames. Our strategy relies on extending into temporal domain wellknown global illumination and rendering techniques such as density estimation path tracing, photon mapping, ray tracing, and irradiance caching, which have been originally designed to handle static scenes only. Our techniques mainly focus on the computation of indirect illumination, which is the most expensive part of global illumination modelling.