Representing Scattering Functions with Spherical Harmonics of Spectral Fourier Components

摘要

A fundamental problem in imaging science and engineering is to characterize wave scattering from a small region of surface or volume. This behavior is generally described by a multidimensional scattering function. This paper proposes a new representation method of scattering functions to optimize data compression. Our method first performs a Fourier transform in the wavelength dimension and then spherical harmonic transform for each Fourier coefficient in the dimensions for spatial directions. The representation errors are studied numerically for using different levels of spherical harmonics and different numbers of Fourier components. This method has the advantage of efficiently storing data of scattering functions and has a great potential of applications in imaging science and engineering.