Real-time diffuse global illumination based on voxelization

Since many years, global illumination algorithms find limited use on interactive applications due to the computational cost for calculating the interaction of light in an environment. A branch of the solutions consist in creating a discretized representation of the scene in order to estimate diffuse interactions from multiple light bounces in real-time. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient approach to compute the light interaction in the scene using a voxel-based representation of diffuse surfaces. Our approach computes indirect bounces of light over the surfaces using a coarse representation based on voxels taking advantages of the GPU. The voxelization process is completely performed on the modern graphics hardware over three different techniques. Also, we add an ambient occlusion effect to improve the quality of the final image, and a filter on image-space. Our tests shown that the algorithm developed is capable to compute the global illumination effects on interactive times over complex scenes.