Paper Abstract
Development and generation of high-fidelity IR scenes to support testing requirements at the Kinetic Kill Vehicle Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator (KHILS) facility at Eglin AFB, Florida has been the mission for the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) scene generation team throughout the past ten years. During that time scene generation efforts have supported operational scenarios ranging from surveillance through terminal homing. Recent programs have required the development of IR target and background models to support the testing needs of a high-speed fuze. Development of IR models and techniques to support high-speed fuze applications required advancing the state-of-the-art in IR scene generation. This effort required the development of several target models not available from other sources. In addition, due to the unusual proximity fuze seeker configuration that utilizes a wide angle lens to encompass a full 360 degree field-of-view (FOV) and very fast frame rate requirements, normal scene generation techniques were not adequate. Hundreds of scenarios consisting of hundreds of image frames were needed to develop the fuzing algorithms. This scene generation requirement necessitated that realistic scene sequences be produced in minutes rather than hours. This paper discusses the IR model development path to generate IR scene sequences to support the algorithm development for this fuzing program. The discussion describes the process and unique modeling techniques that were implemented to build foreign target models that include fighter and bomber aircraft, low-flying cruise missiles, and helicopters. Implementation of appropriate rendering techniques to support the generation of backgrounds that include atmospherics, terrain, and sea for realistic target engagements are also discussed. Finally, a description of the process utilized in merging IR model and commercial hardware solutions to satisfy the IR scene generation requirements for this program is presented.
