Real-Time Generation of Reflections in the Optimized Image Space

This paper proposes a novel image-based method to generate real-time reflections. Our algorithm aims to solve the problem of missing reflections in previous screen space based methods efficiently. Instead of computing reflections in the image space decided by the current eye position, our method conducts most of the reflection calculations in a new image space, which is determined by a carefully chosen camera position at runtime. The major criteria used to choose this optimized camera position is to make its corresponding image space contain as much as possible scene information to generate reflections. Our experimental results indicate that most of the missing reflections problems can be fixed by moving the reflection computations to this new image space. We also prove that the performance gains achieved by executing computations in the new image space can cancel out most of the overhead to generate it.