A roadmap to global illumination in 3D scenes: Solutions for GPU object recognition applications

Light interactions with matter is of remarkable complexity. An adequate modeling of global illumination is a vastly studied topic since the beginning of computer graphics, and still is an unsolved problem. The rendering equation for global illumination is based of refraction and reflection of light in interaction with matter within an environment. This physical process possesses a high computational complexity when implemented in a digital computer. The appearance of an object depends on light interactions with the surface of the material, such as emission, scattering, and absorption. Several image-synthesis methods have been used to realistically render the appearance of light incidence on an object. Recent global illumination algorithms employ mathematical models and computational strategies that improve the efficiency of the simulation solution. This work presents a review the state of the art of global illumination algorithms and focuses on the efficiency of the solution in a computational implementation in a graphics processing unit. A reliable system is developed to simulate realistics scenes in the context of real-time object recognition under different lighting conditions. Computer simulations results are presented and discussed in terms of discrimination capability, and robustness to additive noise, when considering several lighting model reflections and multiple light sources.