Light and Skin Interactions

3.2. Local Light Transport

The global light transport simulation approaches outlined in the previous section rely on the accurate modeling of local interactions between light and matter. In fact, such an interplay between global and local light transport, as appropriately highlighted by Fournier [95], has several theoretical and practical implications such as the possibility of using similar equations and algorithms to simulate light transfers.

The methods commonly used to simulate local light transport can be divided into three groups: deterministic, nondeterministic, and hybrid. The latter refers to combinations of methods from the first two groups. In this section, we outline the main characteristics of two families of methods, namely the ...