How to assess human visual performance on an operational task

A methodology is presented for the assessment of human operator performance in a detection and identification task, using two sets of infrared images of natural outdoor scenes with everyday objects used as targets. It includes measures of effectiveness such as operator detection rate, identification rate, false alarm rate, response time, confidence levels and image quality ratings. This robust methodology could be used in the evaluation of any image improvement technique or to evaluate different imaging techniques or technologies.Katherine Hanton, Jadranka Sunde, Marcus Butavicius, Lakhmi C. Jain and Nicholas Burn