Global illumination is an collective term of photorealistic lighting in computer graphics. Computation of global illumination is expensive in terms of real-time applications such as computer games. Voxel cone tracing is a technique that has shown promise to provide some of the most visually important effects of global illumination in close to real-time. Reducing the computational cost of global illumination enables more visually impressive scenes to be computed.
This thesis evaluates the runtime performance and image quality of global illumination computed using voxel cone tracing in lower resolutions in conjunction with bilateral filtering and joint bilateral upsampling. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation is performed comparing the method against bilinear upsampling.
The results show that the runtime performance is increased while the image quality is reduced. Filtering is shown to reduce specular artifacts. An discussion of the performance and image qualitative characteristics of the method implemented is performed. The image quality is concluded to be maintained due to the filtering being able to reduce artifacts in the low resolution global illumination as a result of the lower resolution.