Interactive Tone Mapping

Abstract

Tone mapping and visual adaptation are crucial for the generation of static, photorealistic images. A largely unexplored problem is the simulation of adaptation and its changes over time on the visual appearance of a scene. These changes are important in interactive applications, including walkthroughs or games, where effects such as dazzling, slow dark-adaptation, or more subtle effects of vi- sual adaptation can greatly enhance the immersive impression. In applications such as driving simulators, these changes must be modeled in order to reproduce the vis- ibility conditions of real-world situations. In this paper, we address the practical issues of interactive tone mapping and propose a simple model of visual adaptation. We describe a multi-pass interactive rendering method that computes the average luminance in a first pass and renders the scene with a tone mapping operator in the second pass. We also propose several extensions to the tone mapping operator of Ferwerda et al. [FPSG96]. We demonstrate our model for the display of global illumination solutions and for interactive walkthroughs.