Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

In this project we investigate the impact of the maritime environment on the propagation of laser beams. This study primarily uses data collected at the Naval Academy with the goal of quantifying the correlation between the statistics of the environmental parameters and the statistics of laser beam intensity at the target. The project has two parts to it: 1) we present a computational analysis of different probability density function approximation techniques; and 2) we introduce preliminary steps towards developing a stochastic model for the maritime laser beam propagation. In the first part of this work we apply three mathematical methods to construct the probability density function of the data: i) the Kernel Density Estimator (KDE) method, ii) the Barakat Method using lower-order moments, and iii) the Bayesian Mixture Model. We compare and contrast the features of the three approximation techniques, first in the context of a synthetic data whose true pdf is known, and next in the context of the laser data. In the second task, we analyze how a complex medium causes the photons of the laser light to behave differently than if they were acting in freespace, by focusing on the stochastic behavior that our data exhibits. We develop a stochastic paraxial wave equation in order to have a mathematical model capable of accepting statistical parameters from the atmosphere as input to allow us to investigate the statistical properties of light intensity at a specified target.