Real-time neural network radiance caching for path tracing

Abstract

A real-time neural radiance caching technique for path-traced global illumination is implemented using a neural network for caching scattered radiance components of global illumination. The neural (network) radiance cache handles fully dynamic scenes, and makes no assumptions about the camera, lighting, geometry, and materials. In contrast with conventional caching, the data-driven approach sidesteps many difficulties of caching algorithms, such as locating, interpolating, and updating cache points. The neural radiance cache is trained via online learning during rendering. Advantages of the neural radiance cache are noise reduction and real-time performance. Importantly, the runtime overhead and memory footprint of the neural radiance cache are stable and independent of scene complexity.