Innovative Approaches to Scene Database Construction

Simulation is a critically important tool for many aspects of electro-optical systems engineering including performance evaluation, test support and training. A common problem is encountered in that the raw sensor data used to generate simulationdatabases is often of a lower resolution than the objective system. An improved technique to generate high resolution geo-specific databases for multi and hyperspectral scene simulation is proposed. The technique employs multi-resolution data and anovel sharpening approach to create simulation databases with realistic background clutter content at high spatial resolution.Modeling and simulation (M&S) are increasingly applied to the design and engineering of spectral and hyperspectral electro-opticalsensing systems, but this effort may serve to galvanize the use of these techniques at a particularly significant point of commercial impact. Currently, Photon Research Associates occupies a favorable position in this market, having a set of simulationcapabilities which are nearly unique in the United States. However, growth in this area has been limited by two factors: First has been the slow adoption of M&S technology by sensor designers - in a hardware dominated field, the design process has beenfocused on hardware related issues (eg; SNR, NEDT, NEDr, spectral resolution, etc) with less consideration given to performance as taken in a end-to-end context including back-end exploitation performance. Second, M&S has failed to sufficiently proveitself as a reliable indicator of performance across the board and M&S development has lagged the development of increasingly sophisticated hardware. In essence, M&S which should be expected to lead the design process and which should be seen to play andexpanded role, particularly in military affairs, as the worldwide democratization of sensing brings added emphasis to exploitation processing, has failed to develop at a sufficiently rapid pace to assume the role it should have.This project will serve to address both of these issues, by providing technology which can increase the fidelity and utility of M&S based systems engineering processes and by simultaneously facilitating the propagation of more sophisticated M&S technologyinto the EO design community. Market timing is ideal because: (1) the design and acquisition process is becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of systems which can be conceived - the problem (especially for acquisition versus research programs) is nowmuch more one of which system should be built, rather than which system can be built; (2) the