We show how shadows can be efficiently generated in differentiable rendering of triangle meshes. Our central observation is that pre-filtered shadow mapping, a technique for approximating shadows based on rendering from the perspective of a light, can be combined with existing differentiable rasterizers to yield differentiable visibility information. We demonstrate at several inverse graphics problems that differentiable shadow maps are orders of magnitude faster than differentiable light transport simulation with similar accuracy -- while differentiable rasterization without shadows often fails to converge.

翻译：我们展示了如何在三角形网格的可微渲染中高效生成阴影。核心发现是：预滤波阴影映射（一种基于光源视角渲染来近似阴影的技术）可与现有可微光栅化器结合，从而获取可微的可见性信息。我们在多个逆向图形问题中验证，可微阴影映射在保持相似精度的前提下，其计算速度比可微光传输模拟快数个数量级——而缺乏阴影的可微光栅化往往无法收敛。