The physical-optics integral and computer graphics

Hardwired graphics processors offer an alternative for doing physical optics (PO) scattering. We present an improved expression to the one obtained by Rius et al. (1993) for the PO integral. We do this by taking advantage of existing information about the normal to the surface at the pixel level. The resulting PO formula reflects not only the distance to the surface at the pixel level, but also the orientation of the surface with respect to the viewing axis.