Urban Illumination for Soldier Simulations and Close-Combat Target Acquisition

JRM Technologies proposes to develop a high-performance physics-based algorithm for TAWS prediction of urban scene EO/NIR light levels, as seen from arbitrary vantage points. The software implementation will apply radiosity techniques using area discretization of scene elements, but will simultaneously incorporate atmospheric effects such as transmission and scattering in the natural and man-made irradiance loading of surfaces. Furthermore, the solution will apply novel form-factor analysis techniques to exploit geometrical simplifications afforded by the building planar surfaces. The result will be a global illumination solution which can subsequently be sampled from arbitrary viewpoints with very little additional computation, affording fast, accurate background predictions for use in target acquisition. Options to the base effort include upgrading the atmospheric model to a highly-optimized Modtran-based transport calculation with more detailed atmospheric property control, upgrading the natural light source model to account for stellar irradiance and propagation through the user-defined atmosphere, improving the artificial source model to incorporate characteristic spectral emittance from known source types, and improving the surface albedo model to allow selection of material types from a library of pre-measured spectral DHR. Additional options will provide optimizations to the surface discretization and radiosity matrix solution algorithms using iterative techniques.