Initial candidates in spatiotemporal resampling

Abstract

Approaches in accordance with various illustrative embodiments provide for the selection and reuse of lighting sample data to generate high quality initial candidates, suitable for input to resampling techniques, that are better representative of the actual lighting of a scene for which an image, video frame, or other such representation is to be rendered. Instead of discarding an important light samples where weight or sample count may no longer be reliable, at least some of these samples can be provided as additional, unweighted candidates for use in importance sampling, in addition to those selected using a random (or semi-random) sampling process. Such an approach can help to ensure that important lights are considered when shading pixels for a scene, at least where such reuse makes sense due to changes in scene or location. Samples reused between frames can relate to various prior samples, such as samples that were determined to correspond to important, close, or bright lights.