Advances in Target Acquisition Modeling II

Abstract

The U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center ~TARDEC! has had a broad interest in modeling and simulation techniques during the last several decades. Specifically, as army ground vehicle designers, our group is interested in predicting the performance of military observers for detecting and discriminating vehicle targets in complex background scenes. We have developed the Visual Perception Laboratory ~VPL! to both calibrate and validate target acquisition models for complex visual tasks. This facility is able to augment field test data by presenting visual stimuli to human observers under controlled laboratory conditions. Laboratory perception testing is synergistic with our other modeling and simulation tools in the early test and evaluation phases of vehicle development programs. It provides a means to perform excursions from currently available model and field test data. The model-test-model paradigm is an inherent necessity at the present state of development for target acquisition models. This special section of Optical Engineering contains a selection of papers on the topic Advances in Target Acquisition Modeling. The contributing authors represent a cross section of international experts in this subject area. The majority of the papers deal with some type of military related acquisition task, although much of this work is applicable to commercial applications as well. The general topic area is quite broad and overlaps with several modeling and simulation research activities including image understanding, expert systems, human psychophysics and object recognition. This collection of papers focuses upon human performance prediction for man-in-the-loop search and target acquisition tasks. It places special emphasis on aided and unaided visual and infrared electro-optical systems. It also complements other special topic sections such as Advances in Recognition Techniques, Parts I and II, which were published in the January and March 1998 issues of Optical Engineering.