Real-world imagery sought for military training.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Air Power

The military services want to be able to rehearse for their missions in simulators that reproduce exactly what they will see and encounter in combat. But with virtual representations of combat zones lagging months behind the real battlefront environment, true "mission rehearsal" is still just a concept for war commanders.

When units have only days--and sometimes just a few hours--to prepare for a mission, not having the most up-to-date training databases can mean the difference between life and death.

"It's a particular concern for that part of our customer community to have that concurrency because we're asking special ops teams to go into an area and carry out a mission," said Chester Kennedy, vice president of engineering at Lockheed Martin Global Training and Logistics. "We sure would like for them to be rehearsing that mission in a database that is very, very, very close to what they're going to experience," he said--not what it was six months or a year ago in that part of the world.

Training simulation databases are typically developed using satellite imagery. Engineers and graphic artists transform the two-dimensional photos into a 3-D representation of the terrain. It is a labor-intensive process that ensures all the elements in the environment--ranging from landscape features such as buildings, roads, rivers and trees to animated objects such as aircraft and troop transports--interact with the proper physical properties.

A typical database that covers a 5-kilometer-by-5-kilometer area of the world requires several "man-months" of effort to accomplish the conversion from a satellite photograph to a training database.

Automating the effort by using advanced image processing algorithms could accomplish the same goal in a matter of hours, Kennedy said. Those processors could take a downlink video from surveillance aircraft and turn it into a 3-D database just as easily as they might convert static 2-D satellite imagery.

Through this "run from source" process, engineers could take imagery that was collected in the morning by a jet fighter or by a...