Abstract

Two interpolants are presented for Runge–Kutta ray tracing using the four-component method. Such a continuous interpolant of ray trajectory connects only two adjacent Runge–Kutta points and requires only the information needed to find the position and ray vector for interpolant of ray position and ray vector to the fourth-order error. However Runge–Kutta schemes in contrast to other schemes are not based on approximating the continuous ray path with a polynomial. For this reason an optimal interpolant is shown that gives the same accuracy for calculating ray position and ray vector as a single-step integration in the Runge–Kutta scheme.

© 1994 Optical Society of America

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