Determination of volume scattering parameters that reproduce the luminance characteristics of diffusers

The extension of a well-known inverse technique, inverse adding-doubling (IAD), is investigated for determining the volume scattering properties of diffusers for display and lighting applications. The luminance characteristics of volume scattering diffusers are vital for these applications. Through a simulation study, it is shown that fitting solely to the scattered (angular) intensity information with the extended IAD method, results in a volume scattering characterization that also reproduces the correct (spatial and angular) luminance characteristics for a wide range of samples. The gap between the simulation work and the experimental application of the investigated fitting procedure is bridged by considering the effect of experimental error in the scattered intensity distributions. This does not significantly alter the presented conclusions.