From Particles to Fields: Reframing Photon Mapping with Continuous Gaussian Photon Fields

ArXi:2512.12459v2 Announce Type: replace Accurately modeling light transport is essential for realistic image synthesis. Photon mapping provides physically grounded estimates of complex global illumination effects such as caustics and specular-diffuse interactions, yet its per-view radiance estimation remains computationally inefficient when rendering multiple views of the same scene. The inefficiency arises from independent photon tracing and stochastic kernel estimation at each viewpoint, leading to inevitable redundant computation.