“Stochastic simplification of aggregate detail” by Cook, Halstead, Planck and Ryu

Many renderers perform poorly on scenes that contain a lot of detailed geometry. The load on the renderer can be alleviated by simplification techniques, which create less expensive representations of geometry that is small on the screen. Current simplification techniques for high-quality surface-based rendering tend to work best with element detail (i.e., detail due to the complexity of individual elements) but not as well with aggregate detail (i.e., detail due to the large number of elements). To address this latter type of detail, we introduce a stochastic technique related to some approaches used for point-based renderers. Scenes are rendered by randomly selecting a subset of the geometric elements and altering those elements statistically to preserve the overall appearance of the scene. The amount of simplification can depend on a number of factors, including screen size, motion blur, and depth of field.

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