Real-time Monte Carlo (MC) ray tracing with low sampling rates demands a denoising algorithm that adeptly balances the trade-off between quality and efficiency. Previous works have paid much attention on designing delicate denoising architecture while ignoring model compression. In this work, we present a render-aware knowledge distillation (RAKD) framework, specifically designed for Monte Carlo denoising. We meticulously delineate the Knowledge Distillation (KD) process within RAKD, emphasizing three pivotal techniques: the strategic incorporation of an auxiliary unlabeled dataset, the integration of adversarial learning through generative adversarial network (GAN), and the application of parameter transfer for robust model initialization. These approaches are harmoniously combined to distill knowledge effectively, enabling our student model to adeptly strike a balance between preserving high-frequency details and reducing low-frequency noise. Finally, our results demonstrate that RAKD achieves state-of-the-art quality while upholding real-time performance, successfully tackling the computational constraints faced by resource-limited devices.

Material appearance is a key component of photorealism, with a pronounced impact on human perception. Although there are many prior works targeting at measuring opaque materials using light-weight setups (e.g., consumer-level cameras), little attention is paid on acquiring the optical properties of translucent materials which are also quite common in nature. In this paper, we present a practical method for acquiring scattering properties of translucent materials, based solely on ordinary images captured with unknown lighting and camera parameters. The key to our method is an inter-pixel translucency prior which states that image pixels of a given homogeneous translucent material typically form curves (dubbed translucent curves) in the RGB space, of which the shapes are determined by the parameters of the material. We leverage this prior in a specially-designed convolutional neural network comprising multiple encoders, a translucency-aware feature fusion module and a cascaded decoder. We demonstrate, through both visual comparisons and quantitative evaluations, that high accuracy can be achieved on a wide range of real-world translucent materials.