Modeling atmospheric effects in the infrared scene generator based on OpenGL

Abstract

Atmospheric effects are one of the important factors that affect the physical realism of the infrared (IR) scene generators. IR scene generators obtained by OpenGL library are used in the applications where performance is critical. Modeling atmospheric effects in the IR band using OpenGL's fog model approach is found in the literature. However, the related fog model needs parameters that are independent of the range. In this paper, a novel model that is developed by using the least squares estimation for the both range and wavelength dependent atmospheric transmittance and atmospheric path radiance is proposed and the related model parameters are transformed to usable equivalent parameters for OpenGL platform. It is demonstrated with the simulations that the proposed model has an error less than 5%.