A novel approach makes higher order wavelets really efficient for radiosity

Since wavelets were introduced in the radiosity algorithm(5), surprisingly little research has been devoted to higher order wavelets and their use in radiosity algorithms. A previous study(13) has shown that wavelet radiosity , and especially higher order wavelet radiosity was not bringing significan t improvements over hierarchical radiosity and was having a very important extra memory cost, thus prohibiting any effective computation. In this pape r, we present a new implementation of wavelets in the radiosity algorithm, that is substantially different from previous implementations in several ke y areas (refinement oracle, link storage, resolution algorithm). We show th at, with this implementation, higher order wavelets are actually bringing a n improvement over standard hierarchical radiosity and lower order wavelets .