Effects of Resolution, Range, and Image Contrast on Target Acquisition Performance:

Objective:We sought to determine the joint influence of resolution, target range, and image contrast on the detection and identification of targets in simulated naturalistic scenes.Background:Resolution requirements for target acquisition have been developed based on threshold values obtained using imaging systems, when target range was fixed, and image characteristics were determined by the system. Subsequent work has examined the influence of factors like target range and image contrast on target acquisition.Method:We varied the resolution and contrast of static images in two experiments. Participants (soldiers) decided whether a human target was located in the scene (detection task) or whether a target was friendly or hostile (identification task). Target range was also varied (50–400 m). In Experiment 1, 30 participants saw color images with a single target exemplar. In Experiment 2, another 30 participants saw monochrome images containing different target exemplars.Results:The effects of target range...