A ray-tracing approach for simulating recognition abilities of active infrared sensor arrays

This paper deals with the simulation and evaluation of the recognition abilities of active infrared sensor arrays for autonomous systems. The simulation is based on a Monte Carlo algorithm, which uses ray-tracing to calculate the impulse response of a receiving element. The emphasis lies in an efficient computation, which means that the rays sent should ideally contribute maximally to the final result and that different sender and receiver characteristics should easily be calculable. Extensive experiments were carried out with the simulation mostly taking less than a minute on an Athlon 650 MHz computer and simulated values being a good approximation of the measured values.