Meshless Hierarchical Radiosity on the GPU

Meshless radiosity [1, 2] is a radiosity method that is based on a point-based and hierarchical discretization of the scene. This better decouples the runtime complexity from the geometric complexity of the scene and allows for an adaptive high-quality simulation of the diffuse global light transport. In this paper, we analyze the bottlenecks of this approach and examine the possibilities for an efficient and parallel implementation of this paradigm on the GPU. We show how by modifying the hierarchical data structures and the computation of the transport operator, a highly efficient GPU-based solution can be achieved which is by orders of magnitude faster and allows to compute high-quality global illumination solutions within seconds. Meshless Hierarchy A meshless hierarchy [1, 2] consisting of m levels allows to represent illumination at a point p in the following way: