Real-Time Simulation of Combined Short-Wave and Long-Wave Infrared Vision on a Head-Up Display

Abstract

Landing under adverse weather conditions can be challenging, even if the airfields are well known to the pilots. This is true for civil as well as military aviation. Within the scope of this paper we concentrate especially on fog conditions. The work has been conducted within the project ALICIA. ALICIA is a research and development project co-funded by European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme. ALICIA aims at developing new and scalable cockpit applications which can extend operations of aircraft in degraded conditions: All Conditions Operations. One of the systems developed is a head-up display that can display a generated symbology together with a raster-mode infrared image. We will detail how we implemented a real-time enabled simulation of a combined short-wave and long-wave infrared image for landing. A major challenge was to integrate several already existing simulation solutions, e.g., for visual simulation and sensors with the required data-bases. For the simulations DLR’s in-house sensor simulation framework F3S was used, together with a commercially available airport model that had to be heavily modified in order to provide realistic infrared data. Special effort was invested for a realistic impression of runway lighting under foggy conditions. We will present results and sketch further improvements for future simulations.