Synthetic hyperspectral data cubes for complex thermal scenes

Generating synthetic hyperspectral data cubes for the thermal is useful because it is very expensive to design and fly such sensors. Using synthetic data is useful in performing trade-off studies, e.g. spectral and radiometric performance requirements, and also in testing new algorithms, e.g. temperature emissivity separation. We have developed a method to simulate complex thermal scenes under variable solar illumination, different materials and including gas plumes. The IDL-based scene simulation tool consists of public domain tools for: 3-D geometry generation, raytracing, spectral and thermal property libraries, atmospheric transmission and emission modeling. The data can then be used in standard hyperspectral processing programs or processed by special purpose programs. We show how this model can be used to generate synthetic data cubes for dispersive and Fourier transform infrared spectrometers (FTIR). The data in turn is then used to evaluate algorithms to separate temperature and emissivity.