Polarization Ray Tracing is a bit like spectral rendering. You might have heard about it, but the technical details - what exactly it is all about, how it is best done, what the benefits are, where you ought to use it, and where you can safely omit it - are not that well known. At least in principle, information about all this is available already - but it is scattered across many different sources, some of which are outside graphics literature, and consequently can be a bit hard to find at first. Also, a number of these resources - in particular publications in physics literature - were not written with graphics engineering in mind, and can prove hard to directly apply to the engineering problem of getting such a renderer to work. This course aims to provide a unified one-stop information resource on this topic, and should enable graphics engineers with a background in physically-based rendering to properly assess whether the phenomenon has to be included in a given simulation, and what has to be done in order to properly allow for handling of the phenomenon in a ray-based renderer. However, the contents of the course are also potentially very relevant for other areas of graphics beyond rendering proper: polarized light is currently being used in several other contexts, such as face scanning, highlight removal, or 3D projection technologies. Engineers and researchers in these other areas might benefit from the course insofar as the knowledge needed for an outright simulation of polarized light transport presented here is a superset of the information needed for more specialized tasks. This comprehensive overview would thus be a useful repository of knowledge for other areas as well.

Level
Advanced

Intended Audience
Engineers who might be confronted with the problem of adding polarization rendering capabilities to an existing rendering system. Researchers working in the area of Predictive Rendering.

Prerequisites
A reasonable grasp of ray-based rendering technology is assumed.

Course Schedule
09:00-09:20 Andrea Weidlich: Physics Background
09:20-09:40 Andrea Weidlich: Options for Mathematically Describing Polarisation
09:40-10:10 Alexander Wilkie: Graphics Problems Where Polarisation Matters
10:10-10:45 Alexander Wilkie: Practical Aspects of Building and Debugging a Polarization Ray Tracer

Presenter(s)
Alexander Wilkie is currently a senior lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He achieved his Habilitation in Applied Computer Science from Vienna University of Technology in June 2008, and served as Assistant Professor between 2000 and 2008. His main research interests are predictive rendering, color science, and appearance modeling. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed papers about computer graphics, and has extensive teaching experience in the areas of photorealistic rendering and color science. He is also one of the original designers and the current maintainer of ART, a polarization-capable rendering research system.

Andrea Weidlich is currently a technical artist at Realtime Technology (RTT) AG in Munich, Germany. She is also an external lecturer at Vienna University of Technology in Austria. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at Vienna University of Technology, after graduating in 2005 with a MS and a PhD in 2009. In 2011, she graduated with a MA in Applied Media from the University for Applied Arts Vienna. Her current research interests include predictive rendering with a special focus on appearance modelings.