A Comparison of Methods for Generating Poisson Disk Distributions

Abstract Poisson disk distributions have many applications in the field of computer graphics. Besides sampling, Poisson disk distributions are used in object distribution, non-photorealistic rendering and procedural texturing. Over the years, a large number of methods for generating Poisson disk distributions have been proposed, making it difficult to choose the right method for a given application. In this paper, we present a detailed comparison of most techniques for generating Poisson disk distributions. The methods we study include dart throwing, relaxation dart throwing, Lloyd’s relaxation, Shade’s Poisson disk tiles, tiled blue noise samples, fast hierarchical importance sampling with blue noise properties, edge-based Poisson disk tiles, template Poisson disk tiles, corner-based Poisson disk tiles and recursive Wang tiles for real-time blue noise. Analysing all of these methods within a single framework is one of the major contributions of this work.