Differentiable Shadow Mapping for Efficient Inverse Graphics
This work addresses the challenge of efficient inverse graphics for applications requiring realistic shadow rendering, though it is incremental as it builds on existing differentiable rasterization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating shadows efficiently in differentiable rendering of triangle meshes by combining pre-filtered shadow mapping with existing differentiable rasterizers, resulting in orders of magnitude faster performance compared to differentiable light transport simulation with similar accuracy.
We show how shadows can be efficiently generated in differentiable rendering of triangle meshes. Our central observation is that pre-filtered shadow mapping, a technique for approximating shadows based on rendering from the perspective of a light, can be combined with existing differentiable rasterizers to yield differentiable visibility information. We demonstrate at several inverse graphics problems that differentiable shadow maps are orders of magnitude faster than differentiable light transport simulation with similar accuracy -- while differentiable rasterization without shadows often fails to converge.