Stochastic Ray Tracing

Stochastic Ray Tracing is an alternative to Whitted Ray Tracing. In the latter, a ray is sent out from the camera into the scene. When it hits an object, a single shadow ray, reflected ray and refracted ray are sent out recursively from the point of intersection.

In  stochastic ray tracing, multiple rays are traced recursively until predefined termination conditions are reached. The rays are usually chosen stochastically across a space/time interval. Stochastic Ray Tracing can help render many complex phenomena that Whitted Ray tracing cannot. These include global illumination, depth of field and soft shadows.The rendered images are usually more photo-realistic compared to those rendered by a conventional ray tracer,

On the downside, it takes a long time to render a high quality image due to the large number of rays involved. Random sampling of rays also gives rise to noise. To render images with low noise, more rays have to be sampled.

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