In their paper “Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing,” Govindarajan, Rebain, Yi, and Tagliasacchi propose a novel scene representation called Radiant Foam that combines efficiency and reconstruction quality. By leveraging a decades-old volumetric mesh ray tracing algorithm based on the Voronoi diagram, the model achieves rendering speeds comparable to Gaussian splatting without the constraints of rasterization. This innovative approach allows for real-time ray tracing on a programmable GPU without specialized hardware or APIs. The method efficiently traces rays through the foam by iterating over the neighbours of each cell, offering a flexible and differentiable model that outperforms hardware-accelerated Gaussian ray tracing in speed while maintaining reconstruction quality.
https://radfoam.github.io