All-frequency lighting with multiscale spherical radial basis functions

This paper proposes a novel multiscale spherical radial basis function (MSRBF) representation for all-frequency lighting. It supports the illumination of distant environment as well as the local illumination commonly used in practical applications, such as games. The key is to define a multiscale and hierarchical structure of spherical radial basis functions (SRBFs) with basis functions uniformly distributed over the sphere. The basis functions are divided into multiple levels according to their coverage (widths). Within the same level, SRBFs have the same width. Larger width SRBFs are responsible for lower frequency lighting while the smaller width ones are responsible for the higher frequency lighting. Hence, our approach can achieve the true all-frequency lighting that is not achievable by the single-scale SRBF approach. Besides, the MSRBF approach is scalable as coarser rendering quality can be achieved without reestimating the coefficients from the raw data. With the homogeneous form of basis functions, the rendering is highly efficient. The practicability of the proposed method is demonstrated with real-time rendering and effective compression for tractable storage. © 2010 IEEE.