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M. Knecht:
"Real-Time Global Illumination Using Temporal Coherence";
Supervisor: M. Wimmer, O. Mattausch; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, TU Wien, 2009; final examination: 2009-07-28.

The goal of this thesis is to produce plausible global illumination in real time using temporal coherence. While direct illumination combined with precomputed static global illumination is widely used in today´s computer games and 3D applications, real-time global illumination that supports arbitrary dynamic scenes and light setups is still an active area of research. This master thesis gives an introduction to global illumination and discusses various methods that have been developed. However, since most of the existing methods need some kind of precomputation to calculate global illumination in real time, they also introduce limitations like static light, scenes or view points. Furthermore other algorithms are not suitable for the capabilities of current graphics hardware or are simply fake approaches. The core of this thesis is an improved version of the instant radiosity and imperfect shadow maps algorithm that reuses illumination information from previous frames. The previous approaches needed a high number of so called virtual point lights to get convincing results, whereas our method achieves visually pleasing results with only a few virtual point lights. As a second extension to the base algorithms we introduce a new method to compute multiple light bounces. In this method the fill rate is drastically reduced and therefore computation time is much lower than in previous aproaches.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_180653.pdf