Experiment: Denoising ray-traced renders with pix2pix

I trained a pix2pix model to denoise images rendered by Blender’s cycles renderer. Here is a validation example from the 400th(and final) epoch:

Running it on a completely different view(compared to the training data):

A butchered, yet cool image resulted from running it on an unrelated scene:

Anyway, there’s a lot more to try out here. Some references to follow up on:

• A Machine Learning Approach for Filtering Monte Carlo Noise(SIGGRAPH 2015) [PDF]
• Part-5 of NVIDIA’s Ray Tracing Gems [Website, needs login]
• Interactive Reconstruction of Monte Carlo Image Sequences using a Recurrent Denoising Autoencoder(SIGGRAPH 2017) [PDF]