Effect of slow display on detectability when browsing large image datasets

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Abstract— In this work, the effect of display temporal characteristics on detectability of signals was studied by comparing detection performance with a slow liquid‐crystal‐display (LCD) monitor and a fast, cathode‐ray‐tube (CRT) monitor when browsing multi‐slice image datasets in stack‐mode presentation. Thirteen readers evaluated 200 image sequence pairs in a two‐alternative forced choice experiment. The image sets consisted of three‐dimensional cluster lumpy backgrounds and were presented to the readers in two display devices: a three‐million‐pixel medical color LCD and a color desktop CRT. For the LCD, many inter‐gray‐level transitions are on the order of 50–60 msec, which was almost twice the frame time. The CRT had 2–5‐msec inter‐gray‐level transitions. The reader study was performed with a graphical‐user interface programmed using direct calls to OpenGL libraries to precisely control the browsing speed. The results were analyzed in terms of the difference in reader performance for each reader and each display, between a browsing speed of 20 and 50 frames per sec (fps). Average reader performance difference between 20 and 50 fps was measured to be 0.049 and 0.156 for the CRT and LCD monitors, respectively. The corresponding drop in reader performance associated with slow display was 0.11.