Ray-Tracing Based Interactive Camera Simulation

Camera simulation aims to enhance realistic rendering, lens design and augmented reality by accurately simulating geometrical optics. Here our work focuses on optical phenomena, such as depth of field, monochromatic aberration, distortion, and aperture exposure, that are based on real camera lens architecture. Our approach is modeling pixel equation using ray tracing algorithm to render scenes after calculating the effect of lens refraction. We also provided an interactive user interface to control camera parameters, allowing for visual display of the corresponding camera lens system and of synthetic rendering result. To promote the performance of ray tracing algorithm, we improved our system using GPGPU programming language, CUDA, and OptiX ray tracing engine that is capable of parallel processing massive multi-ray sampling. We further optimized the sampling method for real-time pixel pupil calculation.