Human Visual Performance
Nearly all military systems have a “man-in-the-loop” interpreting a visual image or controlling a system. Visual perception is a complicated process incorporating optics, physics, physiology and psychology. Over the past 30 years there have been great strides made in understanding and modeling these processes. Much of this modeling is represented in the OptMetrics-developed Visual Perception Model (VPM). VPM predicts the probability that a human can detect a military object in an image. Thus VPM is suitable for analyzing the output of our Tactical Imaging Model (TIM) in terms of expected human perception.
A related problem addressed by our Eye-Tracking Toolkit is determining how a human uses cognitive vision processes to understand a complex visual scene. In fact, humans don’t “take in” a full scene in one glance. A human interprets a scene by sequentially fixating on various points within the scene. Our Eye-Tracking Toolkit assists the researcher in identifying a subject’s fixations and associates each fixation with a 3D object in a real or virtual world. That knowledge can assist in designing computer displays and developing effective training for challenging cognitive tasks.
