Differentiable rendering of translucent objects with respect to their shapes has been a long-standing problem. State-of-the- art methods require detecting object silhouettes or specifying change rates inside translucent objects—both of which can be expensive for translucent objects with complex shapes.

In this paper, we address this problem for translucent objects with no refractive or reflective boundaries. By reparameterizing interior components of differential path integrals, our new formulation does not require change rates to be specified in the interior of objects. Further, we introduce new Monte Carlo estimators based on this formulation that do not require explicit detection of object silhouettes.

• Paper: pdf (6 MB)

@article{Yu:2023:PSDR-Vol2,
  title={Efficient Path-Space Differentiable Volume Rendering With Respect To Shapes},
  author={Yu, Z. and Zhang, C. and Maury, O. and Hery, C. and Dong, Z. and Zhao, S.},
  journal={Computer Graphics Forum},
  volume={42},
  number={4},
  year={2023}
}

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. This work was supported in part by NSF grant 1900927.