Method for accelerating monte carlo renders

Abstract

An image rendering method comprising the steps of: (a) performing a noisy estimation of a given view of a given scene of said image using a Monte-Carlo stochastic renderer, wherein general information of each ray sample, such as color and position in the image plane, is stored, (b) calculating a similarity measure between two sets of samples cast from two pixels of said scene and their neighbors, and (c) generating an output image wherein each pixel color is a weighted combination of the pixel colors generated from (a) with weights based on the similarity measure of (b) between the respective set of samples cast from the pixels and their neighbors.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.