A Novel Method for Fast Rendering of Missile Plume Imagery

Missile exhaust plume emission is the key observable for many of our missile defense sensor systems. High-fidelity plume signature models play a key role in the analysis and simulation of threat missile systems but they are too slow for applications requiring near real-time plume image generation. In order to address this and other limitations, Spectral Sciences, Inc. (SSI) proposes a novel data-driven algorithm suite for fast and accurate rendering of real-world plume imagery. The approach, dubbed FRAMES (Fast Rendering Algorithm for Missile Emission Scenes), involves tying model calculations spanning the scenario space of interest to more sparsely sampled field data (i.e., fewer trajectory points, spectral bands, viewing aspects, pixel size,.) and enables fast frame rate plume imagery (~100Hz) to be generated on a single PC over a very broad range of missile and sensor operational conditions. In Phase I, FRAMES will be demonstrated for a representative missile system in the enhancement region ( altitudes above 100 km). In Phase II, the approach will be extended to include more complex real-world effects and several missile systems of interest will be considered.