A general method for automated analysis of caustics

In most published work on the optical method of caustics, experimental results were obtained by manually measuring some characteristic dimensions of the shadow pattern and, therefore, used only a limited amount of data from the caustic. However, some previous work has been done using digital image processing and light intensity plots combined with least-squares techniques to analyse the shape of a caustic obtained from a particular problem. All of these methods have been developed to solve only one specific problem. This paper highlights the essential guidelines of an automated method, which has the novelty of generalising the whole analysis, such that only the parametric equations of a particular problem are required to solve it. In the proposed method the image is digitised, the central line of the caustic pattern is identified, and the parameters in the mapping equation of the caustic are determined. The method has been validated, and the aim of this paper is to describe the key features of the method, i.e, the optical arrangement, digital image processing, and numerical analysis. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.