Abstract: This survey gives an overview of the use of importance, an adjoint of light, to speed up rendering. The importance of a light distribution indicates its contribution to an image. Importance can be used to focus global illumination and ray tracing calculations where they matter most for image accuracy. In this talk, we attempt to clarify the various uses of adjoints and importance in rendering by bringing them into a unified framework.

One-line summary: What is importance, and what is it good for?

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