Personal Computer (PC) Graphics Support for Texel Level Sensor Simulation

"This topic recognizes the limitations of the graphics hardware/software that has been produced in the past and requests the development or modification of a PC video card to allow it to more accurately simulate the performance of advanced sensors. Thisproposal answers that request by leveraging recent advancements in PC graphics hardware and combines that with a significant amount of research and product development in the area of sensor simulation to yield sensor simulation capabilities that are bothsolidly grounded in validated algorithms and accurately reflect sensor characteristics in the generated image. The latest generation of graphics cards allows the user to download custom programs into the vertex and pixel processing sections of thegraphics pipeline. These custom functions are applied by the graphics hardware to each vertex and pixel being processed. This capability permits the user to get customized performance out of a graphics card without going to the expense of producing customhardware. Multi-texturing has emerged as a powerful new feature of the new generation of graphics cards. These new graphics cards also allow the user to program their texture engines to build textures on the fly from texture components already in thetexture memory. The focus of the project will be to define and produce a series of custom shaders and texture blenders that can be used with PC graphics boards to simulate material-wavelength spe