Real-Time Visualization of Domain Coverage by Dynamically Moving Sensors

A collection of algorithms, visualizations, and interactive operations allow operators controlling the movement of a collection of sensors through an environment to monitor in real time the portion of the environment that can or can't be seen by some subset of the sensors. The visualization allows preattentive detection of the number of sensors that can see a given location, and the coloring lets users identify the sensors' exact identities. This method employs two ray-tracing-based algorithms. A GPU implementation using CUDA (Compute-Unified Device Architecture) allows real-time processing and display of all scene updates and sensor movements.