Understanding Head-Mounted Display FOV in Maritime Search and Rescue Object Detection

Abstract

Object detection when viewing Head Mounted Display (HMD) imagery for maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) detection tasks poses many challenges, for example, objects are difficult to distinguish due to low contrast or low observability. We survey existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) image processing algorithms that improve object detection performance. We also examine central and peripheral vision (HVS) and their relation to Field of View (FOV) within the Human Visual System when viewing such images using HMDs. We present results from our user-study which simulates different maritime scenes used in object detection tasks. Users are tested viewing sample images with different visual features over different FOVs, to inform the development of an AI algorithm for object detection.