A Fast GPU Schedule For À-Trous Wavelet-Based Denoisers

Reiner Dolp, Johannes Hanika, and Carsten Dachsbacher

I3D 2024 (Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Volume 7, Issue 1)

Abstract

Given limitations of contemporary graphics hardware, real-time ray-traced global illumination is only estimated using a few samples per pixel. This consequently causes stochastic noise in the resulting frame sequences which requires wide filter support during denoising for temporally stable estimates.
The edge avoiding à-trous wavelet transform amortizes runtime cost by hierarchical filtering using a constant number of increasingly dilated taps in each iteration. While the number of taps stays constant, the runtime of each iteration increases in these usually memory-throughput bound shaders with increasing dilation, because the increasing non-locality negatively impacts cache hit rates.
We present a scheduling approach that optimizes usage of the memory subsystem by permutating global invocation indices in such a way that each wavelet filter iteration is applied through undilated taps. In contrast to prior approaches, our method has identical performance characteristics in each iteration, effectively decreasing maintenance cost and improving performance predictability. Furthermore, we are able to leverage on-chip memory and hardware texture interpolation.
Our permutation strategy is trivial to integrate into existing wavelet filters as a permutation before and after each level of the wavelet filter. We achieve speedups between 1.3 and 3.8 for usual wavelet configurations in Monte Carlo denoising and computational photography.

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Bibtex

@article{Dolp:2024:FastAtrous,
  title = {A Fast GPU Schedule For {{\`A-Trous}} Wavelet-Based Denoisers},
  author = {Dolp, Reiner and Hanika, Johannes and Dachsbacher, Carsten},
  year = {2024},
  month = {May},
  journal = {Proceedings of the {ACM} on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},
  volume = {7},
  number = {1},
  articleno = {15},
  numpages = {18},
  doi = {10.1145/3651299},
}