Pattern Recognition and Display Characteristics

This paper reports experimental results of human operator performance in a visual recognition task. The work began with a method of generating families of complex patterns to simulate certain characteristics of visual sensor displays, such as radar and infrared returns. The experimental effort was directed toward establishing criteria for predicting human operator performance in a map matching task. The operators' task was to recognize which of four patterns presented simultaneously with a reference pattern belonged to the reference pattern family. The measure of performance was the time in seconds taken by the operator to make a selection. Response times were more rapid when the reference pattern was less complex than the comparison than when the reference pattern was the more complex. Analysis of the display characteristics led to the selection of four physical measures to be used in predicting operator performance. These measures-pattern length, pattern density, and two measures of pattern complexity-correlated highly with response time, were not highly intercorrelated, and were applicable to natural sensor returns. The four measures were found to account for a high degree of the total variance. Regression equations were derived which predict performance from known values of the four measures.