Three-dimensional ray tracing on Delaunay-based reconstructed surfaces

A method of ray tracing for free-form optical surfaces has been developed. The ray tracing through such surfaces is based on Delaunay triangulation of the discrete data of the surface and is related to finite-element modeling. Some numerical examples of applications to analytical, noisy, and experimental free-form surfaces (in particular, a corneal topography map) are presented. Ray-tracing results (i.e., spot diagram root-mean-square error) with the new method are in agreement with those obtained using a modal fitting of the surface, for sampling densities higher than 40 x 40 elements. The method competes in flexibility, simplicity, and computing times with standard methods for surface fitting and ray tracing.