Signature Evaluation for Thermal Infrared Countermine and IED Detection Systems
Abstract
A high-resolution, computational suite has been constructed to produce synthetic thermal imagery of vegetated soil surfaces with landmines or other targets. The imagery is created by coupling models for the ground, vegetation, ray casting, and sensor characteristics to produce realistic thermal infrared simulated imagery. These simulations provide information ranging from simple temperature contrasts to high-resolution images comparable to actual sensor images that can be used to evaluate or train automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. Analyses of the ATR results allow development of recommendations for optimal sensing strategies and additional training to improve ATR performance. The modeling and characterization occurs at the centimeter scale, which requires massively parallel computational resources to meet the demands of the simulation. The models run simultaneously on a single, parallel, or serial computer and communicate using sockets or files. The soil model is a three-dimensional, spatially adaptive, continuous Galerkin, finite element model that simulates partially-saturated flow and heat transport, coupled to two-dimensional surface water flow. The vegetation model simulates infrared absorption, reflection, and transmission by discretized plant leaves and stems. Ray casting provides boundary conditions for the soil and vegetation thermal models, and produces multi-spectral images of energy reflected and emitted from the synthetic scene. Subsuface phase change, distributed root zone moisture uptake and transpiration, and flow through macro pores and cracks are processes under construction. The parallelization of the individual testbed components is relatively straight-forward. The central difficult, in achieving acceptable performance for the computational testbed in a parallel computing environment is the sequencing of data transfers between component a few meters in its longest dimension.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADP023747
Entities
People
- Jerry Ballard Jr.
- John F. Peters
- Larry N. Lynch
- Stacy E. Howington
Organizations
- Engineer Research and Development Center