Illumination from curved reflectors

A technique is presented to compute the reflected illumination from curved mirror surfaces onto other surfaces. In accordance with Fermats principle, this is equivalent to finding extremal paths from the light source to the visible surface via the mirrors. Once pathways of illumination are found, irradiance is computed from the Gaussian curvature of the geometrical wavefront. Techniques from optics, differential geometry and interval analysis are applied to solve these problems. CR Categories and Subject Descriptions: I.3.3 Computer Graphics : Picture/Image Generation; I.3.7 Computer Graphics : Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism General Terms: Algorithms Additional Keywords and Phrases: Caustics, Differential Geometry, Geometrical Optics, Global Illumination, Interval Arithmetic, Ray Tracing, Wavefronts 1. Introduction Ray tracing provides a straightforward means for synthesizing realistic images on the computer. A scene is first modeled, usually by a collection of implici...