Application and evaluation of quasi-Monte Carlo method in illumination optical systems

In this article, we evaluate a quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method with various low-discrepancy sequences (LDS) in illumination optical systems which are adopted in some commercial products, and clarify the method's effectiveness quantitatively. We assumed the evaluated systems were an illumination optical system with a perfectly diffusing surface, and we compared them against the theoretical irradiance distribution. The evaluation results indicate that the QMC method delivers higher asymptotic convergence rate than the MC method does, and there is little difference between each LDS. In evaluation of simple optical systems that can be boiled down to low-dimensional numerical integration problems, the QMC method was found to be extremely effective. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America