DIRSIG

The next release of DIRSIG will feature two major internal optimizations. One which will significantly speed thermal runs. The other which will speed unpolarized radiometric calculations--especially noticeable in hyperspectral cases. New functionality includes a user-configurable interactive mode, which allows for a user-specified ray/solid angle to be traced and for arbitrary data to be extracted from the solution. The output can be either easily-parsable XML or human-friendly plaintext.

The Urban (Hawkeye) scene will soon be made available with secondary sources enabled. For now, these secondary sources can only be rendered using DIRSIG3. Support for this feature is planned for DIRSIG4, but there is no fixed implementation date.

The DIRSIG-4.0.7 build is now available off the myDirsig website. Besides a bunch of smaller bug fixes, the key improvements are to the LIDAR and Polarization models. This is also the first release in which Voxelized Grids can be reliably used ( demonstration ). This release also marks the first time that the DIRS Laboratory has put out an x86-64 based Linux build. Assembled on Fedora Core 5, it takes advantage of the additional registers and instructions added to the 64-bit x86 CPUs. Unfortunately, many of the libraries are dynamically linked, making it difficult to use portably across different Linux platforms. Future releases will feature more static linkage. Note that this version has undergone extensive testing; it is used across our internal compute cluster.

The DIRSIG4 codebase now contains a make_dem tool, outputting either ascii or ENVI image digital elevation maps. Gnuplot can visualize the ascii output (via the splot command). ENVI or Freelook can be used to render the image output. The tool currently requires a .cfg file as input, an annoying limitation. This is due to a design issue in the geometry subsystem; it will be addressed in the future.