Infrared Simulation of Ocean Scene Utilizing PC Graphics Hardware

In remote sensing and military affairs, Infrared (IR) simulation of ocean scene has become more and more important nowadays. Stressing requirements for real-time IR scene generation include high performance and high precision. Although a lot of works present infrared simulations, those techniques cover only a few possible ways of water interacting with the environment. And how to calculate the temperature of ocean surface is rarely introduced by previous investigators. With the advance of programmable features of graphic card, many algorithms previously limited to offline processing have become feasible for real-time usage. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for real-time rendering of infrared ocean scene using the newest features of programmable graphics processors (GPU). It differs from previous works in three aspects: adaptive GPU-based ocean surface tessellation, sophisticated balance equation of thermal balance for ocean surface, and GPU-based rendering for infrared ocean scene. Finally some results of infrared image are shown, which are in good accordance with real images.