Atmospheric Effects and Impact on Target Classification for Synthetic Aperture Ladar (SAL) Imagery

The objective of this research is to model anisoplanatic atmospheric effects for synthetically generated Synthetic Aperture Ladar (SAL) data, and to evaluate the impact of these effects on target classification in SAL imagery. Although SAL wavelengths present key advantages in target exploitation, they are heavily susceptible to atmospheric turbulence; hence the inclusion of atmospheric effects in simulation is crucial. With utilization of an atmospheric modeling toolbox, we introduce the ability to model anisoplanatic atmospheric effects into a ray tracing simulation tool. We show image classification results as a function of atmospheric severity.