Calculation of Target Masking Effects for Air to Surface Ordnance Delivery.

The Perspective View Generator PVG is a database driven simulation that displays a three dimensional synthetic environment from terrain information stored in a two dimensional array. Each terrain element is identified by coordinates which index the array. Each array value contains 32 bits of information arranged to specify the greyshade, elevation and other features of the terrain at that position. Currently there are few areas of the world digitally mapped in the data format accepted by the PVG. The objective of this thesis is to enable the automatic generation of a database for use with the PVG from information available from various sources. The project involves writing computer algorithms to synthesize data from different sources and making modifications to the PVG functions. The source of terrain information is aerial imagery and elevation information which is not resolved fine enough to distinguish tree and building heights. The ability to modify the data base to include object heights allows the PVG to show the target masking effects these objects have in a given region. The resulting synthetic environment can be used for strike planning and as a mission tailored training tool.