Development of Real Time Ray Tracing Software

To create a fast, high power, computational tool that provides high resolution, complex scene geometry input necessary to drive a wide variety of sensor simulations. Installed on powerful computers and applied to a highly detailed battlefield imagery as viewed through a multitude of sensors. The ray trace (RT) approach will calculate and provide input information to imbedded sensor models that would be available in actual field testing. Sensor models include infrared (scanning and staring FLIR, integrators), radar (RCS, SAR, PA), laser (LADAR, LIDAR, designators), and visible. RT is computationally expensive, however; it provides freedom from traditional limitations of polygon rendering. RT is distributable over a refraction. An intelligently devised RT approach could accomodate the equivalent of 300 million polygons. This effort explores the alogithms necessary to render 20 million solids at 5 hertz refresh and 640x480 24 bit resolution. This effort supports automatic target recognition studies and addresses the need to add a multi-spectral signature generation node to the Defense Interactive Simulation community. The design approach will facilitate the addition of other non-signature areas such as vulnerability analyses.