Wide-band relativistic Doppler effect visualization

Abstract

The authors present a flexible and efficient method to simulate the Doppler shift. In this new method the spectral curves of surface properties and light composition are represented by spline functions of wavelength. These functions can cover the entire electromagnetic (EM) waves bandwidth, and incorporate the thermal radiation of objects into the surface property description. In particular, a temperature-dependent emission spectral distribution can be assigned to each object for imaging the nonvisible thermal spectra which may become visible due to blue shift. The Doppler shift and shading operations are performed through the manipulation of spline coefficients. The evaluation of the spline functions, which is computationally expensive, is only carried out once-at the end of each shading loop for generating the display RGB values.