title: Numerical determination of continuous ray tracing: the four-component method.
abstract: Two interpolants are presented for Runge-Kutta ray tracing using the four-component method. Such a continuous interpolant of ray trajectory connects only two adjacent Runge-Kutta points and requires only the information needed to find the position and ray vector for interpolant of ray position and ray vector to the fourth-order error. However Runge-Kutta schemes in contrast to other schemes are not based on approximating the continuous ray path with a polynomial. For this reason an optimal interpolant is shown that gives the same accuracy for calculating ray position and ray vector as a single-step integration in the Runge-Kutta scheme.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Puchalski