Real-time target motion animation for missile warning system testing

The QUick Image Display (QUID) model accurately computes and displays radiance images of aircraft and other objects, generically called targets, at animation rates while the target undergoes unrestricted flight. Animation rates are obtained without sacrificing radiometric accuracy by using two important innovations. First, QUID has been implemented using the Open Scene Graph (OSG) library, an open-source, cross-platform 3-D graphics toolkit for the development of high performance graphics applications in the fields of visual simulation, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling. Written entirely in standard C++ and fully encapsulating OpenGL and its extensions, OSG exploits modern graphics hardware to perform the computationally intensive calculations such as hidden surface removal, 3-D transformations, and shadow casting. Second, a novel formulation for reflective/emissive terms enables rapid and accurate calculation of per-vertex radiance. The bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is a decomposed into separable spectral and angular functions. The spectral terms can be pre-calculated for a user specified band pass and for a set of target-observer ranges. The only BRDF calculations which must be performed during target motion involves the observer-target-source angular functions. QUID supports a variety of target geometry files and is capable of rendering scenes containing high level-of-detail targets with thousands of facets. QUID generates accurate visible to LWIR radiance maps, in-band and spectral signatures. The newest features of QUID are illustrated with radiance and apparent temperature images of threat missiles as viewed by an aircraft missile warning system.