LumiPath -- Towards Real-time Physically-based Rendering on Embedded Devices
This work addresses the problem of enabling intuitive 3D data visualization in medical augmented reality on resource-constrained embedded devices, representing an incremental improvement by adapting rendering techniques to specific hardware constraints.
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving real-time physically-based rendering on embedded devices like optical see-through head-mounted displays by introducing a novel light field that can be sampled in real-time, enabling reasonable rendering results despite limitations in computational power, memory, and power consumption.
With the increasing computational power of today's workstations, real-time physically-based rendering is within reach, rapidly gaining attention across a variety of domains. These have expeditiously applied to medicine, where it is a powerful tool for intuitive 3D data visualization. Embedded devices such as optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST HMDs) have been a trend for medical augmented reality. However, leveraging the obvious benefits of physically-based rendering remains challenging on these devices because of limited computational power, memory usage, and power consumption. We navigate the compromise between device limitations and image quality to achieve reasonable rendering results by introducing a novel light field that can be sampled in real-time on embedded devices. We demonstrate its applications in medicine and discuss limitations of the proposed method. An open-source version of this project is available at https://github.com/lorafib/LumiPath which provides full insight on implementation and exemplary demonstrational material.