Practical Real-Time Lens-Flare Rendering

We present a practical real-time approach for rendering lens-flare effects. While previous work employed costly ray tracing or complex polynomial expressions, we present a coarser, but also significantly faster solution. Our method is based on a first-order approximation of the ray transfer in an optical system, which allows us to derive a matrix that maps lens flare-producing light rays directly to the sensor. The resulting approach is easy to implement and produces physically-plausible images at high framerates on standard off-the-shelf graphics hardware.

@Article { LE13,
  author       = "Lee, Sungkil and Eisemann, Elmar",
  title        = "Practical Real-Time Lens-Flare Rendering",
  journal      = "Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of EGSR)",
  number       = "4",
  volume       = "32",
  pages        = "1-6",
  month        = "July 2013",
  year         = "2013",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2013/LE13"
}