Simulation of Stressing Optical Clutter for Scene Generation

Infrared sensors play an important role in missile defense systems, and continued improvement in their performance is critical as adversary payloads become smaller, cooler, and dimmer. While there can be no substitute for in-situ performance testing, the risks, cost, and development time for future systems can be reduced through accurate scene and sensor simulations. Current scene simulation algorithms do not model radiometrically complex scenes with sufficient accuracy for arbitrary line-of-sight conditions across the spectrum. Complex scenes include those with aurora, polar mesospheric clouds, stratospheric warming, etc., and often include multiple phenomena within the line-of-sight. Our Phase 2 effort provides an enhanced capability for generating atmospheric simulations of stressing optical scenes. Our highly successful Phase 1 effort demonstrated the capability to simulate stressing atmospheric structure along flight paths from threat regions. The Phase 2 proposal includes expansion of our inventory of validated scene simulations, development of new techniques to allow proper scene generation in different geographic and geophysical settings, scene clutter characterization for high-fidelity simulation on small spatial-temporal scales, 3-dimensional data field construction for auroral and thermal structure rendering, inclusion of additional phenomena, and development of interface control documentation to support transition of these scene simulation capabilities into BEST.