Development of a Tool for the Semi-Automated Restoration of Vehicle-Sized Thermal Clutter in Topographic Height Fields Arising from Terrain Discontinuities

Physics-based target and background simulations are used extensively by the missile development community for seeker development and testing. Signature Research, Inc. (SGR) proposes to improve the spatial fidelity of the background by adding an important class of clutter objects, features that have near vertical discontinuities in the terrain topography. These features include washes, dry creeks, gulches, berms, arroyos, and road shoulders. This clutter class is important because these features are at or near ground vehicle sizes and solar heat differentially. SGR will use hydraulic erosion algorithms to notionally restore terrain features that are smoothed by the inherent spatial resolution of the topographic height fields. The physics-based erosion algorithms utilize the height field gradients, soil properties, and water volume. In the proposed semi-automatic software application the user controls the erosion parameters to approximate these features. SGR also proposes to develop the tools to automatically apply a variable thickness soil layer two-dimensional thermal mesh to the height field containing discontinuous features with integration to the one-dimensional soil models and develop a specialized thermal solver compatible with the mesh. The resulting soil node physical temperatures and height field will facilitate accurate rendering with either raster or ray-trace methods to form images.