Geospecific Night Imagery for Real-time Training Simulators

Renaissance Sciences Corporation (RSC), Terrain Experts, Inc., Harris Corp., and L3 propose a software system that procedurally derives geospecific cultural lighting from night imagery and supplemental data sources, and incorporates the resulting raster imagery and vector data into runtime databases for training simulators. Environmental lighting from artificial (‘cultural‘) sources, one of the most important night-time phenomena, is generally not represented by modern training systems for either out-the-window or sensor views. The extraction of geospecific cultural lighting from night imagery as well as its procedural generation is an effort to make the option of rendering light patterns from populated areas a reality. This novel technology will have decisive advantages over current state-of-the-art database generation tools, which do not take advantage of night imagery source data and other sources from which geospecific cultural lighting can be derived.