Method for simulating the effects of the optical quality of windshield

A computer implemented method for generating a map of point spread function convolutional kernels which simulates effects of optical distortions of a windshield on an image recording quality of a digital image recording device,

• wherein said method takes as input a measured optical quality function related to the optical distortions of the windshield,
• wherein said method provides as output a map of point spread function convolutional kernels simulating the effects of optical distortions of a windshield on the image recording quality of the digital image recording device, wherein said method comprises the following steps:
• (a) modelling at least one sheet of transparent mineral glass comprising two main parallel faces, wherein a surface of at least one of said two main parallel faces is textured with the measured optical quality function, and wherein the sheet of mineral glass is placed in front of a grid of point sources and is inclined, in respect to said grid, with an installation angle of said windshield in a transporting vehicle;
• (b) calculating, with a stochastic ray tracing method, a global illuminance arriving through the modelled inclined sheet of transparent mineral glass from the grid used as a light source, and
• (c) computing a projection of the global illuminance for each point source of the grid from the view frustum of a virtual camera with an optical camera model, wherein said virtual camera is placed in front of an opposite main face of the sheet of transparent mineral glass with respect to the grid used as a light source and at a position corresponding to an installation position of the digital image recording device, wherein the projected grid of point sources is a map of point spread function convolutional kernels, wherein each point spread function convolutional kernel is associated to a point source of the grid.