New metrics for clutter affecting human target acquisition

Clutter plays a very important role in the area of human-in-the-loop target acquisition. A great deal of interest has recently been shown in defining clutter for electro-optical images. In spite of so many definitions available, no single clutter definition has been agreed on by the electro-optical community as being the best. We modify the structure similarity index, which is extensively used for image quality assessment, to be clutter metrics and call them target structure similarity measures (TSSIMs). Two different methods for calculating the TSSIM metrics are suggested. The TSSIMs of many images in Search/spl I.bar/2 dataset have been analyzed. Experimental results show the proposed metrics correlate very well to the detection probability of the observers.