Digital Image Generator for Real-Time Display of Nuclear Backgrounds for Optical/Infrared Sensors

"The team of Visidyne, Inc. and Mission Research Corporation proposes to develop a high-fidelity, real-time Nuclear Optical Dynamic Digital Image Generator (NODDIG) to support the development and testing of algorithms for the mitigation of optical clutterin nuclear environments. The NODDIG concept is a software/hardware digital scene generator. It will complement and support infrared sensors under test by DTRA's Nuclear Optical Dynamic Display System (NODDS). Presently available image generators areeither too slow or afford incomplete models of the burst-disturbed backgrounds from high-altitude nuclear events (HANEs). The IRSim code, developed and maintained by Visidyne, is the DTRA standard for producing high-fidelity structured scenes and scenesequences. However, IRSim is several orders of magnitude too slow to be used in "real time" for hardware-in-the-loop sensor testing. Other, faster stochastic methods have been used to generate background clutter images, but they lack the fidelity andtraceability inherent in DTRA's IRSim. In Phase I Visidyne demonstrated that nuclear background structure can be displayed on a PC at frame rates exceeding requirements using a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 3-D graphics accelerator. In Phase II theVisidyne Team proposes to develop and demonstrate a novel, real-time nuclear digital image generator to complement the NODDS display system. The innovation consists in adapting the key algorithms from