Interactive Tone Mapping

Tone mapping and visual adaptation are crucial for the generation of static, photorealistic images. A largely unexplored problem is the simulation of adaptation and its changes over time on the visual appearance of a scene. These changes are important in interactive applications, including walkthroughs or games, where effects such as dazzling, slow dark-adaptation, or more subtle effects of visual adaptation can greatly enhance the immersive impression. In applications such as driving simulators, these changes must be modeled in order to reproduce the visibility conditions of real-world situations. In this paper, we address the practical issues of interactive tone mapping and propose a simple model of visual adaptation. We describe a multi-pass interactive rendering method that computes the average luminance in a first pass and renders the scene with a tone mapping operator in the second pass. We also propose several extensions to the tone mapping operator of Ferwerda et al. [FPSG96]. We demonstrate our model for the display of global illumination solutions and for interactive walkthroughs.