PHYSICS-BASED SIMULATION OF REALISTIC LIGHTING AND ILLUMINATION FOR NEXT GENERATION GROUND VEHICLE IMAGE GENERATORS

Over the past several years, the rate of advancements in modern computer hardware and graphics computing capabilities has increased exponentially and provided unprecedented opportunities within the Modeling and Simulation community to increase the visual fidelity and quality in new Image Generators (IGs). As a result, IG vendors are continuously reevaluating the best way to make use of these new performance improvements. Some vendors have chosen to increase the resolution of the environment by displaying higher resolution imagery from disk while other vendors have chosen to increase the number of polygons that are capable of being presented in the scene while maintaining 60Hz. While all of these approaches use the latest hardware technology to improve the quality of the simulated environment in the IG, the authors of this paper have chosen to focus on a different approach; to improve the accuracy and realism of the simulated environment. To accomplish this, the authors have developed capabilities that exploit the modern advances in hardware and graphics processing to mimic the human vision system and improve each pixel with enhanced atmospheric and illumination calculations improving the accuracy and realism of these pixels on the display’s surface.