The reconstruction of optical properties for opaque mediums is highly desired for medical, atmosphere and aerosol applications. However, the modeling and reconstruction process is highly related with multiple scattering phenomena, which elevates both the complexity and computational costs for such efforts. This work introduces a time-based Markov chain method, which uses a sparse transition matrix to represent the likelihood for a photon to transit in the turbid media. The accuracy of the time-based Markov chain model was verified against the forwarding calculations of the scattering-based Markov chain model and Monte Carlo simulations. Then, reconstruction was performed with backscattered photon angular distributions. Based on the characteristics of the sparse transition matrix, the optical properties (droplet diameters) could be obtained layer by layer with transmitted photon distributions at different time durations. It is shown that the time-based Markov chain model can reconstruct the optical properties of a turbid slab with satisfactory accuracy and lower computational costs
