Separable Approximation of Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion (AO) provides an effective approximation to global illumination that enjoys widespread use amongst practitioners. In this paper, we present a fast easy-to-implement separable approximation to screen space ambient occlusion. Computing occlusion first along a single direction and then transporting this occlusion into a second pass that is stochastically evaluating the final shading based on the AO estimates proves extremely efficient. Combined with interleaved sampling and geometry-aware blur, visually convincing results close to a non-separable occlusion can be obtained at much higher performance.

@InProceedings { HBRHE11,
  author       = "Huang, Jing and Boubekeur, Tamy and Ritschel, Tobias and Hollaender, Matthias and Eisemann, Elmar",
  title        = "Separable Approximation of Ambient Occlusion",
  booktitle    = "Short paper at Eurographics",
  pages        = "1-4",
  year         = "2011",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2011/HBRHE11"
}