Army Aviation FLIR Mission Planning Enhancement
Abstract
Aviators rely heavily on Forward Looking InfraRed (FLIR) imagery to navigate and to rapidly and accurately detect and identify targets. Weather and weather impacted terrain and targets can significantly alter terrain-target infrared contrast relationships impeding an aircrew's ability to effectively use FLIR imagery for mission accomplishment, potentially increasing aviator's exposure to enemy threats and counterattacks, and ultimately decreasing system lethality and survivability. Pre-flight physics-based "through the sensor" infrared synthetic scenes can mitigate the impact of weather by portraying the weather impacted terrain-target infrared battlefield scenes accurately. The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), the Air Force Research Agency (AFRA), and the U.S. Army Aviation Test Directorate tested the utility of the Infrared Target-scene Simulation Software (IRTSS) system as a mission planning and rehearsal tool for Apache attack aviation. Pre-flight infrared synthetic scene mission enhancement was quantified based on Battle Position (BP) rankings, as compared to the rankings of a Standardization Instructor Pilot (SIP), target detection times, number of target false detects, and number of target non- detects. Questionnaires were used to qualitatively assess the `value' of pre-flight synthetic infrared scenes as judged by Army aviators.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADP023098
Entities
People
- George G. Koerig
- Robert E. Davis
- Stephen T. Milton
Organizations
- Engineer Research and Development Center