mitransient

mitransient is an open-source, differentiable rendering engine designed for simulating light transport at picosecond resolutions. It enables modeling of time-of-flight (ToF) systems, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, and transient optical phenomena. Built as an extension to Mitsuba 3, it serves as a virtual optics lab for robotics, computational imaging, sensor design, and AI training.

Features

• Picosecond-accurate simulation of transient light transport
• Fully differentiable pipeline for gradient-based optimization
• Retargetable JIT compilation to CPU/GPU/LLVM backends
• Supports simulation of ToF sensors, NLOS imaging, scattering media and light polarization
• Modular and extensible Python/C++ APIs
• Open-source, pip-installable package

Video

mitransient presentation.

Using the software

The repository can be found here. Software dependencies are Mitsuba 3 and DrJit; supports Python 3.8+ with standard scientific stack (NumPy, SciPy); seamlessly integrates with PyTorch/TensorFlow for AI-driven workflows.