Wavelet Methods for Radiance Computations

This paper describes a new algorithm to compute radiance in a synthetic environment. Motivated by the success of wavelet methods for radiosity computations we have applied multi wavelet bases to the computation of radiance in the presence of glossy reflectors. We have implemented this algorithm and report on some experiments performed with it. In particular we show that the convergence properties of basis functions with 1–4 vanishing moments are in accordance with theoretical predictions. As in the case of wavelet radiosity we find higher order bases to have advantages. However, the cost scaling due to the higher dimensionality of the problem is such that the higher order bases only become competitive for very high precision requirements. In practice we rarely go beyond piecewise linear functions.