Edge-aware denoising framework for real-time mobile ray tracing

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile hardware-accelerated ray tracing, visual quality at low sampling rates (1spp) significantly deteriorates due to high-frequency noise and temporal artifacts introduced by Monte Carlo path tracing. Traditional spatiotemporal denoising methods, such as Spatiotemporal Variance-Guided Filtering (SVGF), effectively suppress noise by fusing multi-frame information and using geometry buffer (G-buffer) guided filters. However, their reliance on per-frame variance computation and global filtering imposes prohibitive overhead for mobile devices. This paper proposes an edge-aware, data-driven real-time denoising architecture within the SVGF framework, tailored explicitly for mobile computational constraints. Our method introduces two key innovations that eliminate variance estimation overhead: (1) an adaptive filtering kernel sizing mechanism, which dynamically adjusts filtering scope based on local complexity analysis of the G-buffer; and (2) a data-driven weight table construction strategy, converting traditional computational processes into efficient real-time lookup operations. These innovations significantly enhance processing efficiency while preserving edge accuracy. Experimental results on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 768G platform demonstrate that our method achieves 55 FPS with 1spp input. This frame rate is 67.42% higher than mobile-optimized SVGF, provides better visual quality, and reduces power consumption by 16.80%. Our solution offers a practical and efficient denoising framework suitable for real-time ray tracing in mobile gaming and AR/VR applications.