Scene generation and projection technologies: real-time methodologies and validation efforts

An advanced sensor test facility, located at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) has been designed for sensor calibration and performance characterization of advanced infrared sensors for strategic and tactile systems. During the past few years a sensor test facility, known as the 7V Chamber, has been used to support the Army's Interceptor Programs. This chamber complements other focal-plane-array and sensor-test capabilities developed at AEDC to provide ground test support for strategic and tactical sensor systems. The 7V Chamber is a state-of-the-art cryo-vacuum facility providing calibration and high-fidelity mission simulation using complex backgrounds and targets. This paper describes a validation effort for determining the point spread function (PSF) and corresponding wavefront errors. A method is described for measuring a highly under-sampled PSF and determining the corresponding wavefront error. This method employs a knife- edge distribution inversion of Bessel-distributed densities with a Gaussian approximation to implement a nonlinear least- squares functional fit using a Levenberg-Marquardt method.