U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) has long been a leader in
in-band high fidelity scientific scene generation. Recent efforts to harness and exploit the parallel power of the Graphics
Processor Unit (GPU), for both graphics and general purpose processing, have been paramount. The emergence of
sophisticated image generation software packages, such as the Common Scene Generator (CSG) and the Joint Signature
Image Generator (JSIG), have lead to a sharp increase in the performance of digital simulations and signal injection and
projection systems in both tactical and strategic programs. One area of missile simulations that benefits from this
technology is real-time modeling of optical effects, such as seeker dome distortion, glint, blurring effects, and correcting
for facility misalignment and distortion. This paper discusses the on-going research of applying convolution filters to the
GPU multi-pass rendering process to compensate for spatial distortion in the optical projection path for synthetic
environments.
KEYWORDS: Zoom lenses, Calibration, High dynamic range imaging, Projection systems, Convolution, Error analysis, Commercial off the shelf technology, Image processing, OpenGL, Linear filtering
AMRDEC has developed and implemented new techniques for rendering real-time 32-bit floating point energy-conserved
dynamic scenes using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Personal Computer (PC) based hardware and high
performance nVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The AMRDEC IGStudio rendering framework with the real-time
Joint Scientific Image Generator (JSIG) core has been integrated into numerous AMRDEC Hardware-in-the-loop
(HWIL) facilities, successfully replacing the lower fidelity legacy SGI hardware and software. JSIG uses high dynamic
range unnormalized radiometric 32-bit floating point rendering through the use of GPU frame buffer objects (FBOs). A
high performance nested zoom anti-aliasing (NZAA) technique was developed to address performance and geometric
errors of past zoom anti-aliasing (ZAA) implementations. The NZAA capability for multi-object and occluded object
representations includes: cluster ZAA, object ZAA, sub-object ZAA, and point source generation for unresolved objects.
This technique has an optimal 128x128 pixel asymmetrical field-of-view zoom. The current NZAA capability supports
up to 8 objects in real-time with a near future capability of increasing to a theoretical 128 objects in real-time. JSIG
performs other dynamic entity effects which are applied in vertex and fragment shaders. These effects include floating
point dynamic signature application, dynamic model ablation heating models, and per-material thermal emissivity rolloff
interpolated on a per-pixel zoomed window basis. JSIG additionally performs full scene per-pixel effects in a post
render process. These effects include real-time convolutions, optical scene corrections, per-frame calibrations, and
energy distribution blur used to compensate for projector element energy limitations.
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