News Release

UC San Diego computer science faculty Tzu-Mao Li brings home best paper award from SIGGRAPH Asia 2023

Dec. 20, 2023--Tzu-Mao Li, an assistant professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received one of five best paper awards at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. The paper, “Warped-Area Reparametrization of Differential Path Integrals” was co-authored with researchers at MIT and UC Irvine. 

Abstract:

Physics-based differentiable rendering is becoming increasingly crucial for tasks in inverse rendering and machine learning pipelines. To address dis- continuities caused by geometric boundaries and occlusion, two classes of methods have been proposed: 1) the edge-sampling methods that directly sample light paths at the scene discontinuity boundaries, which require nontrivial data structures and precomputation to select the edges, and 2) the reparameterization methods that avoid discontinuity sampling but are currently limited to hemispherical integrals and unidirectional path tracing.

We introduce a new mathematical formulation that enjoys the benefits of both classes of methods. Unlike previous reparameterization work that focused on hemispherical integral, we derive the reparameterization in the path space. As a result, to estimate derivatives using our formulation, we can apply advanced Monte Carlo rendering methods, such as bidirectional path tracing, while avoiding explicit sampling of discontinuity boundaries. We show differentiable rendering and inverse rendering results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Full paper PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3618330

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