VECTORIZATION AND PRECISE REFRACTIONS IN BEAM TRACING

In this paper we propose two improvements to the beam tracing method, one is to reduce the final redundant-drawing of pixel fragments into the frame buffer, and the other is to use Snell's law instead of the tangent law. It is well known that the ray tracing scheme is one of the most effective methods for high quality CG image synthesis. The beam tracing method was introduced because traditional ray tracing algorithms have a significant calculation cost. In the improved method, the projection screen is recursively divided into non-overlapping coherent region segments based on the coherence of the ray-trace-tree structure of a given scene, and an image can be synthesized after the segmentation process by tracing one or several rays in each region segment. We introduced Snell's law for the refractions of the rays. Therefore, we can reduce the computational cost of ray tracing, eliminate the extra calculations caused by overlapping polygons on a screen, and increase the quality of CG images generated by our proposed method.