Comprehensive high-speed simulation software for ladar systems

Simulation of LADAR systems is particularly important for the verification of the system design through the performance assessment. Although many researchers attempted to develop various kinds of LADAR simulators, most of them have some limitations in being practically used for the general design of diverse types of LADAR system. We thus attempt to develop high-speed simulation software that is applicable to different types of LADAR system. In summary, we analyzed the previous studies related to LADAR simulation and, based on those existing works, performed the sensor modeling in various aspects. For the high-speed operation, we incorporate time-efficient incremental coherent ray-tracing algorithms, 3D spatial database systems for efficient spatial query, and CUDA based parallel computing. The simulator is mainly composed of three modules: geometry, radiometry, and visualization modules. Regarding the experimental results, our simulation software could successfully generate the simulated data based on the pre-defined system parameters. The validation of simulation results is performed by the comparison with the real LADAR data, and the intermediate results are promising. We believe that the developed simulator can be widely useful for various fields.

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