Virtual Reality Applications to Aerospace
Dr. Venkat Devarajan, Director of VEL, was the chief architect of TOPSCENE, a system designed to provide the ability for military pilots to train for situational awareness on air to ground missions. The technology was developed when Dr. Devarajan worked for LTV Missiles and Electronics which eventually became Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control Systems, Dallas, TX. It was the first time that aerial imagery and satellite imagery were stored on mass storage devices, accessed and manipulated in real time to give the illusion of smooth motion over gaming areas. As a side product some of earliest Digital Photogrammetry technology was developed at Dr. Devarajan’s lab at Lockheed Martin. TOPSCENE has since then found wide acceptance in all services of the US military and Digital Photogrammetry has become ubiquitous.
Since coming to UT Arlington as a Professor, Dr. Devarajan has continued to work with his former TOPSCENE group to develop data bases for TOPSCENE in a more efficient manner and to increase the inherent accuracy in targeting.
Computer Vision work in Mechanical CAD
In mid 1990’s Dr. Devarajan and his students worked on the classical problem of extracting intelligent information from the lines, arcs and circles of a typical 2D Mechanical CAD drawings and attempt to create design feature based 3 D models which were just then coming in to prominence. The initial R&D work was sufficiently promising for Dr. Devarajan to start a company called Imagecom Inc. The company then continued to develop the idea in to patentable technology and a product called FlexiDesign. Imagecom is now a small business with several customers in commercial and military market.
From an R&D point of view, the problem that the students affiliated with VEL that worked on the 2D to 3D conversion is one of computer vision. Publications related to this technology can be found at …