Fast Point Source Shadowing Determination for Mesh-Based Physical Optics Analysis

Physical optics (PO) is a classic asymptotic method, for e.g. scattering analysis and antenna placement analysis. In the latter case point source illuminations are employed. This paper considers mesh-based PO, where the structure is meshed with large numbers of elements, typically triangles. A crucial step is to determine the geometric visibility of each mesh element/edge centroid. Not much has been published on methods yielding optimal runtime cost scaling for point source shadowing determination. This paper presents results with a new image-space buffer shadowing determination algorithm which relies on recursive multi-level subdivision of the source’s field-of-view. Optimal, linear runtime cost scaling is demonstrated for a very challenging test case.