Video intensity mapping for fair receiver comparison

In underwater acoustic signal processing, sonar receivers are often compared and judged qualitatively by visually examining intensity or false-color plots of the 2D test statistic outputs on a computer monitor. A major danger with this approach is that human observers are often biased by aesthetic qualities or artifacts introduced either unintentionally or intentionally by the video intensity map designer. Motivated by this problem, we develop an approach for "fairly" displaying receiver outputs that is based on using nonparametric tolerance intervals to optimally quantize the test statistic pixels into luminance codewords that are then mapped into video intensities chosen to satisfy Weber's law. Application to actual underwater acoustic data suggests the new approach works well.