The invention produces a higher quality image from a rendering system based on a relationship between the output of a rendering system and the parameters used to compute them. Specifically, noise is removed in rendering by estimating the functional dependency between sample features and the random inputs to the system. Mutual information is applied to a local neighborhood of samples in each part of the image. This dependency is then used to reduce the importance of certain scene features in a cross-bilateral filter, which preserves scene detail. The results produced by the invention are computed in a few minutes thereby making it reasonably robust for use in production environments.