# Two-Stage Monte Carlo Denoising with Adaptive Sampling and Kernel Pool

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16115/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [FastDVDnet: Towards Real-Time Deep Video Denoising Without Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01361/) (2019)
- [Supervised Raw Video Denoising with a Benchmark Dataset on Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14013/) (2020)
- [Basis Prediction Networks for Effective Burst Denoising with Large Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04421/) (2019)
- [A Trilateral Weighted Sparse Coding Scheme for Real-World Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04364/) (2018)
- [Multi-channel Weighted Nuclear Norm Minimization for Real Color Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09912/) (2017)
- [Model-blind Video Denoising Via Frame-to-frame Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12766/) (2018)
- [External Prior Guided Internal Prior Learning for Real-World Noisy Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04505/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monte Carlo path tracer renders noisy image sequences at low sampling counts. Although great progress has been made on denoising such sequences, existing methods still suffer from spatial and temporary artifacts. In this paper, we tackle the problems in Monte Carlo rendering by proposing a two-stage denoiser based on the adaptive sampling strategy. In the first stage, concurrent to adjusting samples per pixel (spp) on-the-fly, we reuse the computations to generate extra denoising kernels applying on the adaptively rendered image. Rather than a direct prediction of pixel-wise kernels, we save the overhead complexity by interpolating such kernels from a public kernel pool, which can be dynamically updated to fit input signals. In the second stage, we design the position-aware pooling and semantic alignment operators to improve spatial-temporal stability. Our method was first benchmarked on 10 synthesized scenes rendered from the Mitsuba renderer and then validated on 3 additional scenes rendered from our self-built RTX-based renderer. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of both numerical error and visual quality.