ARO Multi-Disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) - Concealed Target Simulation

Sponsor(s): Army Research Office (ARO)

Research Team: Marek Jakubowski (B.S. Student), David Pogorzala, Emmett Ientilucci, David Messinger

Project Scope: This project is lead by Georgia Institute of Technology and is a collaboration with University of Maryland , University of Florida , University of Hawaii , and Clark Atlanta University . The goal of the project is to study the phenomenology and exploitation of spectral signatures of land targets. RIT's role in the program is to provide high-fidelity synthetic scene data to the algorithm development team for testing purposes. Previous work under this project involved construction of a thermal infrared hyperspectral scene consisting of a desert area containing land mines. In the final phase of this program, RIT is providing a synthetic scene of a forested area containing targets under various levels of concealment.

Figure 2-1: (left) Oblique rendering of the concealed target scene showing vehicles under various levels of concealment. (right) Zoom of two vehicles in the scene (cirlces).

Project Status: A site near Rochester , NY was chosen for the concealed target scene for several reasons. The site was accessible, provided several types of forest and levels of forestation, and was an area for which we had obtained large amounts of hyperspectral imagery. The layout of the scene was carefully determined through accurate GPS measurements of the vegetation location and detailed measurements of the tree height, width, etc. This information was used to create the geometric (i.e., CAD) representation of the vegetation (including shrubbery) in the area.

A measurements campaign was conducted to characterize the spectral signatures of the materials in the scene. All of the information was collected into the larger DIRSIG databases and the scene was rendered for comparison to airborne hyperspectral imagery. Targets of interest (trucks and tanks) were embedded in the scene for final renderings, as shown in Figure 2-1. Several versions of the scene are now being developed (various look angles, times of day, etc.) for distribution to the MURI team.