New Target Acquisition Task for Contemporary Operating Environments: Personnel in MWIR, LWIR and SWIR

摘要

Operating environments that US Soldiers and Marines are in have changed, along with the types of tasks that they are required to perform. In addition, the potential imaging sensor options available have increased. These changes make it necessary to examine how these new tasks are affected by waveband and time of day. US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, Communications Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center, Night Vision and Electronic Sensor Directorate (NVESD), investigated one such task for several wavebands (MWIR, LWIR, Visible, and SWIR) and during both day and night. This task involved identification of nine different personnel targets: US Soldier, US Marine, Eastern-European/Asian Soldier, Urban Insurgent, Rural Insurgent, Hostile Militia, Indigenous Inhabitant, Contract Laborer, and Reporter. These nine distinct targets were made up from three tactically significant categories: Friendly Force, Combatant and Neutral/Non-Combatant. A ten second video was taken of an actor dressed as one of these targets. The actors walk a square pattern, enabling all aspects to be seen in each video clip. Target characteristics were measured and characteristic dimension, target contrast tabulated. A nine-alternative, forced-choice human perception test was performed at NVESD. This test allowed NVESD to quantify the ability of observers to discriminate between personnel targets for each waveband and time of day. The task difficulty criterion, V50, was also calculated allowing for future modeling using the NVESD sensor performance model.