Exploiting Spatial Redundancy with Adaptive Pyramidal Rendering

Just as image data compression is designed to save space while preserving the essence of an image, we present an adaptive pyramidal rendering scheme designed to save rendering time while maintaining acceptable image quality. Our coarse-to-fine scheme predicts when and where it is safe to take less than one sample per output pixel, and exploits spatial redundancy to predict pixel colors in the resulting gaps, both of which can be performed at framerate in realtime on a modern GPU. As a lossy compression method, we present experimental data on the rendering time versus image quality tradeoff for several example renderers.