A high dynamic range rendering pipeline for interactive applications

High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering has a growing success in video-games and virtual reality applications, as it improves the image quality and the player's immersion feeling. In this paper, we propose a new method, based on a physical lighting model, to compute in real time a HDR illumination in virtual environments. Our method allows to re-use existing virtual environments as input, and computes HDR images in photometric units. Then, from these HDR images, displayable 8-bit images are rendered with a tone mapping operator and displayed on a standard display device. The HDR computation and the tone mapping are implemented in OpenSceneGraph with pixel shaders. The lighting model, together with a perceptual tone mapping, improve the perceptual realism of the rendered images at low cost. The method is illustrated with a practical application where the dynamic range of the virtual environment is a key rendering issue: night-time driving simulation. This work will be published on the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: VC
• Authors: Josselin Petit, Roland Brémond
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Images, Tone Mapping, VC 2010, Virtual Environment