Light transport on Arbitrary Surfaces

[kaanaksit]

We know that we can propagate a hologram to any image plane at any distance. This propagation is a plane-to-plane interaction. However, there may be cases where a simulation involves finding light distribution over an arbitrary surface. Conventionally, this could be achieved by propagating the hologram to multiple different planes and picking the results from each plane on the surface of that arbitrary surface. We challenge our readers to code the mentioned baseline (multiple planes for arbitrary surfaces) and ask them to develop a beam propagation that is less computationally expensive and works for arbitrary surfaces (e.g., tilted planes or arbitrary shapes). This development could either rely on classical approaches or involve learning-based methods. The resultant method could be part of odak.learn.wave submodule as a new class odak.learn.wave.propagate_arbitrary. In addition, a unit test test/test_learn_propagate_arbitrary.py has to adopt this new class. To add these to odak, you can rely on the pull request feature on GitHub. You can also create a new engineering note for arbitrary surfaces in docs/notes/beam_propagation_arbitrary_surfaces.md.