Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion through Summed-Area Tables

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for high quality real time graphics nowadays. Shadows play an important role to the realism of computer-generated images, enhancing depth, curvature and localization senses. Due to their global nature, shadows introduce overwhelming complexity to rendering algorithms. Recently, screen-space ambient occlusion techniques started to flourish, and are now the de facto standard for real-time dynamic shadow synthesis. A few issues remain, though, such as the sampling quality and noise artifacts. The contributions of this work are two-folded: a variation of screen-space ambient occlusion that uses Summed-Area Tables, yielding to satisfactory results yet performing better than previous attempts, and serves as a new application to the arsenal of Summed-Area Tables.