DIRSIG

Last week, Brian Flusche (one of our students) defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Analysis of Multi-Modal Fusion for Target Detection in an Urban Environment". Brian's research reflects how many people are using DIRSIG to simulate data in an effort to explore the value of new and novel exploitation schemes. In this case, Brian was trading the value of hyper-spectral imaging vs. polarimetric imaging vs. a combination of the two for doing target detection in an urban environment. In addition to his great use of DIRSIG (you can't expect us to be unbiased!), Brian was able to draw some very interesting and valuable conclusions. It you would like too watch his defense, it was recorded and is available here . A copy of his dissertation is available here . The DIRSIG Team would like to congratulate Brian on his work and the successful defense of his Ph.D research. Good job, Dr. Brian.

We've just put together another DIRSIG "demo" simulation. It shows a camera placed indoors. The scene is illuminated by both a secondary source at the ceiling and through a window cut-out at the far end of the room. This demonstration will be included in the next DIRSIG release.

The next DIRSIG Basic Training course will be held at the NASA Ames Research Center on Feb 23-25, 2011. The course is open to everyone (not just NASA employees). More information is available on the DIRSIG training webpage

We have placed an update to the MegaScene1 distribution on myDIRSIG. The major aspect of this release is that it comes with a set of DIRSIG4 .scene files. This release also includes updates to material properties including the conversion of the tree leaf optical properties from extinction to transmission. We have found that changing this optical property provided speed ups because a large number of calls to the exponent function (to compute the transmission from the extinction) are eliminated. You can also download an update to MicroScene1. Like MegaScene1, we had neglected to push out an update of MicroScene1 with DIRSIG4 .scene files that were as simple to use as "unzip and use". Both updated scene files can be downloaded by registered users from the myDIRSIG website.

This release is primarily a maintenance release to address a few bugs in the 4.4.0 release. A "release candidate" is a preview of the next release of DIRSIG. This version of the software is produced when we feel the software is ready for release, but we would like some last-minute user feedback. Our early adopters always help spot a few lingering issues that our release quality control process misses. We expect the official version of 4.4.1 to be released around Jan 14th, 2011 The following is a summary of fixes and features added in this release: First release to include a Windows 64-bit version Improvements to correlated deviate models used for jitter The frequency spectrum can now (optionally) include the phase Various LIDAR related improvements Speedups for atmospheric backscatter returns Bug fix for Linear-mode APD LIDAR detector model Various GUI bug fixes and improvements Improvements to streamline integration with SUMO and CityEngine SUMO v