Fast Depth of Field Rendering with Surface Splatting

We present a new fast algorithm for rendering the depth-of-field effect for point-based surfaces. The algorithm handles partial occlusion correctly, it does not suffer from intensity leakage and it renders depth-of- field in presence of transparent surfaces. The algorithm is new in that it exploits the level-of-detail to select the surface detail according to the amount of depth-blur applied. This makes the speed of the algorithm practically independent of the amount of depth-blur. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the Elliptical Weighted Average (EWA) surface splatting. We present a mathematical analysis that extends the screenspace EWA surface splatting to handle depth-of-field rendering with level-of-detail, and we demonstrate the algorithm on example renderings.