Supercomputer-based advanced ladar imaging simulator (ALIS)

Abstract

The Advanced Ladar Imaging Simulator (ALIS) is a comprehensive multi-dimensional laser radar system simulator that models complex atmospheric scenes combined with high-resolution solid object scenes. The primary functions of ALIS are to serve as a laser radar sensor design tool, data product generator for exploitation, and a decision aid for implementing system designs. This paper focuses on the software structure of the simulator and the challenges that it presents. The ambient atmospheric scene generation is augmented with built-in approximate plume models or with external large-scale Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics plume models. The mixed atmosphere and solid object scene is generated via an adaptively meshed, over-sampled voxel representation predicated jointly on the sensor capabilities and scene complexity. To our knowledge, ALIS goes beyond previous ladar simulators with detailed atmospheric turbulence effects and time-dependent plume dispersion models for direct and coherent detection frequencyagile transceivers. ALIS models a wide range of ladar architectures, treating laser coherence properties, receiver electronics noise/transfer functions, and electronics/photon statistical noise. It provides complex amplitude ladar echo "range cubes" (all range reports along a given line-of-sight) for the composite atmosphere-solid scene. The model complexity and its capability to process large (>10 9 ) voxel count scenes is accommodated with a portable, scalable software architecture that supports single processors to fine-grained parallel supercomputers.