We have developed a novel, comprehensive theory of volumetric

radiance estimation. This theory allows for estimating in-scattered

radiance at a point, or the accumulated in-scattered radiance along a
camera beam. Both of these operations can be performed using the
standard photon map representation as done in previous work.
Moreover,
our theory generalizes both of these operations by introducing
the concept of photon beams, a more compact, and expressive
intermediate
representation of lighting in participating media. The
combination of these two data representations and two query operations
results in a collection of nine distinct radiance estimates for
computing complex lighting in participating media.
Due to the increased expressiveness of this new lighting representation,
photon beams have a significant performance and quality
benefit over standard volumetric photon mapping, while requiring
less photons. This representation can also be viewed as a way to
implicitly
increase the effective resolution of a photon map, thereby
reducing bias (blur) and also significantly reducing variance. Using
this representation, we are able to render extremely sharp details