Application of the Transfer Matrix Method to Anti-reflective Coating Rendering.

Thin-film coating is a common practice to modify the appearance of materials. In optics for example, coating is often used on mirrors or lenses to modify their reflectance and transmittance properties. To achieve high transmittance optics or wavelength selective filters for sensors, multilayer coatings are required. Thin-film coating is an active area of research. In this paper we introduce to the rendering community the transfer matrix method to calculate the Fresnel coefficients for multilayer thin-film coating. This method, commonly used in optics, provides an easy way to calculate reflectance and transmittance coefficients for an arbitrary number of thin-film layers. Unlike previous methods [10], which relied on the infinite Airy summation, this method is based on the multiplication of \(2\times 2\) matrices which allows handling more general cases. We apply this method to simulate physically based anti-reflective coating where a single layer of thin-film coating is often not enough to obtain a good performance over the full visible spectrum.