Real-Time Non-Contact Detection of Surface Contamination

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) and its academic partner, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), will continue to advance the capability of RIT"s DIRSIG hyperspectral scene simulation software to enable accurate prediction of LWIR reflectance characteristics of liquid-contaminated surfaces. DIRSIG reflectance model and software modifications will be implemented by RIT. In conjunction with RIT"s effort, PSI will create a wide variety of contaminant-substrate combinations and perform physical and spectroscopic characterization of those samples in to support testing and validation of the simulation capability developed by RIT. By the end of the Phase II program, we anticipate that DIRSIG simulations will facilitate prediction of features which can be exploited by spectral-matching-based target detection algorithms. Complementary to the DIRSIG development effort, PSI will also develop a compact field-deployable LWIR spectrometer and signal processing system capable of detecting and identifying surface contamination on the basis of contaminant-induced reflectance features. Specifically, we will develop and test a prototype LWIR Spatial Heterodyne Spectrometer (SHS) to determine the practical limits of LWIR spectral radiance measurements for surface contamination detection. Tests will be conducted against the same contaminant-substrate combinations used for DIRSIG development.