A Comparison of Tabular PDF Inversion Methods
The most common form of tabular inversion used in computer graphics is to compute the cumulative distribution table of a probability distribution (PDF) and then search within it to transform points, using an O(log n) binary search. Besides the standard inversion method, however, several other discrete inversion algorithms exist that can perform the same transformation in O(1) time per point. In this paper, we examine the performance of three of these alternate methods, two of which are new.
pdf inversion importance sampling sample generation