Light transport in refractive turbid media.

Light scattering in refractive media can be used for visualization of caustics and singularities of wavefronts of the incident radiation. Its modeling requires solving the radiative transfer equation. Numerical solution of the radiative transfer equation in turbid media with a spatially varying refractive index is presented and discussed in this paper. The approach is based on the self-consistent approximation of the radiative transfer equation and results in a relatively inexpensive and robust numerical algorithm. Simulations are presented for several cases including a weakly scattering medium with varying refractive index and a refractive weakly scattering medium with embedded highly scattering objects.