Sensor Fused Night Vision : Assessing Image Quality in the Lab and in the Field

Generating real-time fused combinations of VNIR, SWIR and LWIR imagery enhances situational awareness, task performance, and overall image quality. However, no quantitative means to link image quality metrics with task performance exist for fused imaging, the way it does for single modality imaging. We illustrate how fused image quality is affected by multiple dimensions, including scene illumination, reflectance contrast, thermal contrast, sensor resolution, noise-limited resolution, local adaptive gain & contrast enhancement, noise cleaning, and fusion methodology. Task performance has also been assessed in two field collection campaigns, and multiple human performance tests in the lab using field data. Though image fusion clearly improves subjective image quality, a means to predict task performance improvement is still lacking