Modern Enhanced and Synthetic Vision Systems (ESVS) usually incorporate complex 3D displays, for example, terrain visualizations with color-coded altitude, obstacle representations that change their level of detail based on distance, semi-transparent overlays, dynamic labels, etc. All of these elements can be conveniently implemented by using a modern scene graph implementation. OpenSceneGraph offers such a data structure. Furthermore, OpenSceneGraph includes a broad support for industry-standard file formats, so 3D data and models from other applications can be used. OpenSceneGraph has a large user community and is driven by open source development. Thus a selection of visualization techniques is available and often solutions for common problems can be found easily in the community’s discussion groups. On the other side, documentation is sometimes outdated or nonexistent. We investigate which ESVS applications can be realized using OpenSceneGraph and on which platforms this is possible. Furthermore, we take a look at technical and license limitations.

Date Published: 21 May 2015
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9471, Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2015, 947109 (21 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2179948

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9471:
Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2015
Jack Sanders-Reed; Jarvis J. Arthur III, Editor(s)