Shadows for Infrared Scene Generation

In the infrared spectrum, two contributions to shadows exist: one part are reflective shadows resulting from occlusion of instantly reflected infrared rays, and the other part are thermal shadows occurring through occlusion of irradiance in the past. The realization of thermal shadows requires a thermal balance calculation in 4D (3D geometry in 1D time) which is computational expensive, and therefore mostly used for non-real-time simulations. This paper proposes new algorithms for the approximation of thermal shadows that run on state-of-the-art computer graphic cards.