VISUAL CONSPICUOUSNESS DETERMINES HUMAN TARGET ACQUISITION PERFORMANCE

A simple and efficient psychophysical procedure is presented to quanti fy the visual conspicuity of a target in a complex (natural) scene. Me asurements can easily and quickly be performed in the field or in comp lex environments. Only a few observers (typically two to three) are ne eded to achieve sufficient accuracy. We show that this conspicuity mea sure predicts human visual search performance in realistic and militar y relevant complex scenarios. Also, conspicuity measured on photograph ic slides agrees with conspicuity measured in the field, which implies that the new conspicuity measure can be used in combination with phot osimulation studies to optimize and evaluate the visual distinctness o f displayed information. (C) 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumenta tion Engineers.