A real-time aircraft infrared imaging simulation platform

Infrared imaging simulation has great application potential in both military and civilian fields and has been widely used in target detection and identification, sensor performance evaluation, military training, etc. This paper proposes a real-time aircraft infrared imaging simulation platform which can perform a complete infrared imaging simulation procedure of an aircraft. Four aspects are considered to calculate the real-time physical model of aircraft infrared radiation based on GPU and Cg programming language, involving temperature model, infrared radiation model of zero-distance, atmospheric transfer model and infrared imaging system effect model. The idea of CFD finite element calculation method is introduced to solve the aircraft surface temperature field in real time. Each vertex of 3D geometric model is seen as a calculation object and processed with the vertex shader of GPU. And MODTRAN is integrated as an external module for simulating atmosphere transfer effect. OGRE graphics engine is adopted to realize the 3D scene organization and image rendering. Analysis of simulation results shows that this platform can dynamically and efficiently generate realistic infrared images of aircrafts in real time varying with different simulation parameters.