Iglesias-Guitian, Jose A.Mane, PrajitaMoon, Bochang2025-04-302025-04-302020-11-12J. A. Iglesias-Guitian, P. Mane and B. Moon, "Real-Time Denoising of Volumetric Path Tracing for Direct Volume Rendering," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 2734-2747, 1 July 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.30376801941-05061077-2626http://hdl.handle.net/2183/41894© 2020 IEEE. This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.3037680[Abstract]: Direct volume rendering (DVR) using volumetric path tracing (VPT) is a scientific visualization technique that simulates light transport with objects’ matter using physically-based lighting models. Monte Carlo (MC) path tracing is often used with surface models, yet its application for volumetric models is difficult due to the complexity of integrating MC light-paths in volumetric media with none or smooth material boundaries. Moreover, auxiliary geometry-buffers (G-buffers) produced for volumes are typically very noisy, failing to guide image denoisers relying on that information to preserve image details. This makes existing real-time denoisers, which take noise-free G-buffers as their input, less effective when denoising VPT images. We propose the necessary modifications to an image-based denoiser previously used when rendering surface models, and demonstrate effective denoising of VPT images. In particular, our denoising exploits temporal coherence between frames, without relying on noise-free G-buffers, which has been a common assumption of existing denoisers for surface-models. Our technique preserves high-frequency details through a weighted recursive least squares that handles heterogeneous noise for volumetric models. We show for various real data sets that our method improves the visual fidelity and temporal stability of VPT during classic DVR operations such as camera movements, modifications of the light sources, and editions to the volume transfer functioneng© 2020, IEEEVolume renderingGlobal illuminationPath-tracingParticipating mediaImage-space filteringReal-time denoisingjournal articleopen access