Solving the Classic Radiosity Equation Using Multigrid Techniques

We investigate the application of multigrid techniques to the solution of the "classic" radiosity equation. After overviews of the global illumination problem and of radiosity, we describe the latter's solution via multigrid methods.

An implementation of the multigrid algorithm presented here is able to solve the classic radiosity equation in about 50% of the time required by the more commonly-used Gauss-Seidel approach. Although few researchers currently use classic radiosity, we discuss possibilities for the adaption of multigrid methods to more recent radiosity solution techniques.