Visualization and animation for situation awareness in the battlefield
Abstract
A battlefield is a complex multidimensional environment populated with a large number of various battle entities. The environment is constantly evolving and updated by a positional change of each entity. In order to win the battle, a commander must possess a clear understanding in a time-critical manner of who is where and what is happening; that is, a commander must build good Situation Awareness (SA). The task of building SA introduces a huge cognitive overhead due to the information complexity residing in the representation of a battlefield. It is even more difficult to combine the understanding of individual aspects of the battlefield into a single comprehensive view. In this dissertation, we identify various visual abstractions of the battlefield that help a military commander to achieve SA of the battlefield, and we also provide techniques to compute them efficiently. We also develop a terrain visualization module which traditionally has been favored in the battlefield visualization. Computationally, we explore the techniques from the point of view of dynamic computational geometry. In particular, we investigate Delaunay triangulation and its dynamic update extensively. We also consider how to visualize the result in both computationally and perceptually efficient ways. To efficiently deliver the representation to the human visual system, we apply the principles of human visual perception. Finally, using behavioral animation techniques, we simulate the battlefield, which provides the inputs to the visual computation.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hoffmann, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Computer science
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