Space-Time Hierarchical Radiosity with Clustering and Higher-Order Wavelets

We address in this paper the issue of computing diffuse global illumination solutions for animation sequences. The principal difficulties lie in the computational complexity of global illumination, emphasized by the movement of objects and the large number of frames to compute, as well as the potential for creating temporal discontinuities in the illumination, a particularly noticeable artifact. We demonstrate how space-time hierarchical radiosity, i.e. the application to the time dimension of a hierarchical decomposition algorithm, can be effectively used to obtain smooth animations: first by proposing the integration of spatial clustering in a space-time hierarchy; second, by using a higher-order wavelet basis adapted for the temporal dimension. The resulting algorithm is capable of creating time-dependent radiosity solutions efficiently.