A Low-Discrepancy Sampler that Distributes Monte Carlo Errors as a Blue Noise in Screen Space

Abstract

We introduce a sampler that generates per-pixel samples achiev- ing high visual quality thanks to two key properties related to the Monte Carlo errors that it produces. First, the sequence of each pixel is an Owen-scrambled Sobol sequence that has state-of-the-art convergence properties. The Monte Carlo errors have thus low mag- nitudes. Second, these errors are distributed as a blue noise in screen space. This makes them visually even more acceptable. Our sam- pler is lightweight and fast. We implement it with a small texture and two xor operations. Our supplemental material provides comparisons against previous work for different scenes and sample counts.