Adaptive Ray Marching for Rendering Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces

摘要

Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS) represent geometry as a distribution over implicit functions. Modeling an object’s appearance as the expected rendering of a GPIS yields a unified framework that captures diverse light-transport effects including microfacet-like reflections and volumetric scattering. Despite this generality, computing GPIS–ray intersections requires sampling conditional multivariate Gaussian distributions along each ray and remains prohibitively expensive. We introduce an online sampling algorithm that draws these distributions incrementally, and an adaptive marching scheme that takes large steps where the surface is provably absent, minimizing the probability of missed intersections. Together, these ideas reduce rendering MSE by up to 46 × at equal time compared to existing methods.