Infrared scene capabilities of ShipIR (v4.2)

Numerous improvements have been made to the scene capabilities of ShipIR/NTCS since its early development (Vaitekunas and Lawrence, 1999). This paper will revisit some of the earlier technologies, how they remain largely unchanged except for two important upgrades relating to Open GL 3.0, namely off-screen rendering in hardware using Frame Buffer Objects and 32-bit floating-point colour. The net result is a two order of magnitude (100x) improvement in rendering precision of the infrared scene in ShipIR/NTCS (v4.2). A sample image analysis will investigate the sensitivity of the simulated seeker output to changes in frame buffer resolution (spatial and colour) and the simulation speed.