Tracing Analytic Ray Curves for Light and Sound Propagation in Non-linear Media

Abstract: The physical world consists of spatially varying media, such as the atmosphere and the ocean, in which light and sound propagates along non-linear trajectories. This presents a challenge to existing ray-tracing based methods, which are widely adopted to simulate propagation due to their efficiency and flexibility, but assume linear rays. We present a novel algorithm that traces analytic ray curves computed from local media gradients, and utilizes the closed-form solutions of both the intersections of the ray curves with planar surfaces, and the travel distance. By constructing an adaptive unstructured mesh, our algorithm is able to model general media profiles that vary in three dimensions with complex boundaries consisting of terrains and other scene objects such as buildings. We trace the analytic ray curves using the adaptive unstructured mesh, which considerably improves the efficiency over prior methods. We highlight the algorithm's application on simulation of sound and visual propagation in outdoor scenes.