Auxiliary Features-Guided Super Resolution for Monte Carlo Rendering

Abstract: This paper investigates super resolution to reduce the number of pixels to render and thus speed up Monte Carlo rendering algorithms. While great progress has been made to super resolution technologies, it is essentially an ill-posed problem and cannot recover high-frequency details in renderings. To address this problem, we exploit high-resolution auxiliary features to guide super resolution of low-resolution renderings. These high-resolution auxiliary features can be quickly rendered by a rendering engine and at the same time provide valuable high-frequency details to assist super resolution. To this end, we develop a cross-modality Transformer network that consists of an auxiliary feature branch and a low-resolution rendering branch. These two branches are designed to fuse high-resolution auxiliary features with the corresponding low-resolution rendering. Furthermore, we design residual densely-connected Swin Transformer groups to learn to extract representative features to enable high-quality super-resolution. Our experiments show that our auxiliary features-guided super-resolution method outperforms both super-resolution methods and Monte Carlo denoising methods in producing high-quality renderings.