Methodology study for development of a motion imagery quality metric

Abstract

The motion imagery community would benefit from the availability of standard measures for assessing image interpretability. The National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS) has served as a community standard for still imagery, but no comparable scale exists for motion imagery. Several considerations unique to motion imagery indicate that the standard methodology employed in the past for NIIRS development may not be applicable or, at a minimum, requires modifications. The dynamic nature of motion imagery introduces a number of factors that do not affect the perceived interpretability of still imagery - namely target motion and camera motion. A set of studies sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) have been conducted to understand and quantify the effects of critical factors. This study discusses the development and validation of a methodology that has been proposed for the development of a NIIRS-like scale for motion imagery. The methodology adapts the standard NIIRS development procedures to the softcopy exploitation environment and focuses on image interpretation tasks that target the dynamic nature of motion imagery. This paper describes the proposed methodology, presents the findings from a methodology assessment evaluation, and offers recommendations for the full development of a scale for motion imagery.