Joint neural denoising of surfaces and volumes

Abstract

Denoising images rendered using Monte Carlo sampled ray tracing is an important technique for improving the image quality when low sample counts are used. Ray traced scenes that include volumes in addition to surface geometry are more complex, and noisy when low sample counts are used to render in real-time. Joint neural denoising of surfaces and volumes enables combined volume and surface denoising in real time from low sample count renderings. At least one rendered image is decomposed into volume and surface layers, leveraging spatio-temporal neural denoisers for both the surface and volume components. The individual denoised surface and volume components are composited using learned weights and denoised transmittance. A surface and volume denoiser architecture outperforms current denoisers in scenes containing both surfaces and volumes, and produces temporally stable results at interactive rates.