Handbook of Digital Image Synthesis: Scientific Foundations of Rendering

The Handbook of Digital Image Synthesis constitutes a comprehensive reference guide in the rapidly-developing field of computer graphics, whose applications span not only the movie and gaming industries, but also digital marketing, industrial and architectural design, virtual-environment simulators, and medical imaging. This resource provides an extensive, yet concise, treatment of the elementary principles and advanced concepts underpinning digital image synthesis, while covering a broad range of scientific topics such as pure and applied mathematics, geometric surfaces and data structures, the physics of light interaction and propagation, analytical and numerical simulation schemes, and optical perception and imaging. With its foundations laid from the ground up, the content includes a compilation of the theoretical formulas relevant for practical implementation in an actual rendering system, along with their step-by-step derivation, which provides field practitioners with a thorough understanding of their underlying assumptions and limitations, as well as with the methodologies necessary to adapt the results to new problems. Throughout, the presentation of the material is substantiated by numerous figures and computer-generated images illustrating the core ideas, several tables synthesizing results and industry standards, and platform-independent pseudo-code highlighting the core algorithms, in addition to a large collection of bibliographic references to the literature and an index of the standard scientific terms defined therein, thereby allowing the reader to rapidly harness fundamental notions and experimental trends.