Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio back

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by spectral] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

Here is a discussion about your problem : [LINK http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7816]

They suggest to reduce the sharpness of the filter, because it seems that high-contrast (even with undesired effect) is the filter purpose.

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by davepermen] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

filtering after hdr -> ldr is not an option, i guess?

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by ingenious] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

>> spectral wrote:Have you try to "reject" the sample, instead of clamping the color ?

Honnestly I don't understand the meaning of a negative weight !
You cannot reject evey sample that is weighed negatively - this would defeat the purpose of the filter. There's a motivation for negative weighting in PBRT and i Mitchel's original paper from around the 1990. In short, such kernels with negative weights act both as blurring and as sharpening (Laplacian) filters, which prevents over-smoothing of sharp features.
 >> spectral wrote:Here is a discussion about your problem : [LINK http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7816]

They suggest to reduce the sharpness of the filter, because it seems that high-contrast (even with undesired effect) is the filter purpose.
But this is not a real solution, as it will increase blurring.
 >> davepermen wrote:filtering after hdr -> ldr is not an option, i guess?
This would mean to apply tone mapping on the raw image plane samples. This is theoretically possible, but this means you have to store and process them individually, which might be intractable, especially if you have more than a dozen per pixel.

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by spectral] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

You're right [SMILEY :-P]

But the mitchell filter work this way... by definition. I'm not sure that there is a way to "know" when this "sharp effect" is desired or not !
For sure, working in LDR should help... to test use the first pass of your renderer and apply the mitchell-filter in GIMP !

So, maybe it will be better to use a gaussian filter... or a cubic one to keep the kernel size to 2 !

Or maybe you have to "intelligently clamp" your negative value (filter*color) to avoid too high negative values ! (I don't like this !!!)

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by madd] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

Why not just stick with filters with non-negative weights, eg. box or cook?  Are the other filters really that much better in practice?

According to [LINK http://randomcontrol.com/forum/showthread.php?2981-FEATURES-UPGRADE-AA-revisited], fryrender has switched from mitchell to box filtering. Also, see last post by "chema" on that page.

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by Serendipity] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

A box filter is really the worst reconstruction filter and produces a lot of aliasing so it would really surprise me if they use that one. However, I second not to use any filters that use negative weights, in my opinion a triangle or gaussian filter is the best option.
If you really want to use these I would probably try to clamp negative values to a certain limit like -1.0 or -sqrt(number of samples) so you have a chance to get rid of negative values with enough samples and still have the sharpening on the image regions that are not so difficult.

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by spectral] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

The problem with clamping is that you don't preserve the energy with this kind of filter... so for me it is better to avoid them... in some cases !

When you check the randomcontrol page, I don't really agree that they have improved their AA... in some cases you see more blur ! Anyway a filter is a question of taste... so it is always better to allow the use to choice by himself !

Does someone has already try some kind of 'adaptative filtering', so, based on the contrast (and other informations...) you choose a specific filter for each pixel ! Maybe be using a kind of 'bootstrap' phase (like mlt) to analyse the scene general 'style' and then you choose one !

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by beason] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

>> madd wrote:According to [LINK http://randomcontrol.com/forum/showthread.php?2981-FEATURES-UPGRADE-AA-revisited], fryrender has switched from mitchell to box filtering. Also, see last post by "chema" on that page.
Hah, sounds like they do what I do. Render a higher-resolution image internally with whatever filter you want (in my case, triangle), tonemap, then downsample with boxfilter/averaging. Works beautifully. I'm not the first to do this though, I think this was suggested on the indigo blog.
 >> spectral wrote:
When you check the randomcontrol page, I don't really agree that they have improved their AA... in some cases you see more blur !

Where do you see more blur?

(L) [2012/05/08] [ost by ingenious] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

Well, I think rendering in higher resolution and downscaling after tone mapping is pretty much the standard solution to the high-energy aliasing problem.

But OK, what  wanted to know was whether there's any good solution to the black halo problem with negative weights. So far, the bloom seems as the only reasonable option.

(L) [2012/05/09] [ost by spectral] [Re: Pixel filters with negative weights - is there a solutio] Wayback!

>> beason wrote:Where do you see more blur?
In the guitar picture, on the right small picture, sometimes the "lines" looks larger... sometimes not !
It seems that sometimes the previous algorithm produce better results, sometimes not !