Image clutter metrics and target acquisition performance

Abstract

Introduction/purpose: Measuring target acquisition performance in imaging systems with human-in-the-loop plays an essential role in military applications. This paper presents an extended review on the application of image clutter metrics for target acquisition, with the aim of using objective measures to predict the detection probability, false alarm probability and mean search time of the target in the image. Methods: To determine the degree of clutter, simple features on the global (picture-wise) and local (target-wise) level were used as well as contrast-based clutter metrics, target size and metrics derived from image quality assessment measures. Along with the standard ones, the features derived from the distribution of mean subtracted contrast normalized coefficients were also used. To compare the results of the objective scores and the experimental results obtained on the publicly available Search_2 dataset, regression laws accepted in the literature were applied. Linear correlations and rank correlations were used as quantitative measures of agreement. Results: It is shown that the best agreement with target acquisition indicators is obtained by applying clutter metrics derived from image quality assessment measures. The correlation with the results of subjective tests is up to 90%, which indicates the need for further research. A special contribution of the paper is the analysis of the target acquisition prediction performance using simple features at the global and local level, where it is shown that the prediction performance can be improved by determining the features around the target. Furthermore, it was shown that the false alarm probability and the probability of detection can be predicted based on the mean target search time in the image with a probability higher than 90%. Conclusion: In addition to obtaining a high degree of agreement between the objective metrics of clutter and the results of subjective tests (up to 90%), there is a need to improve the existing and develop new metrics as well as to conduct new subjective tests.