Abstract
Our analysis of the available literature on quantitative quality indices characterizing the visibility, conspicuity, and saliency of the objects in an image reveals that the used approaches do not fit the military needs, in particular those required by the target sightseeing systems of armored vehicles. Their main drawback is that these indices are not target-oriented. The long elapsed time needed for their evaluation is another inconvenience, making them inapplicable for military purposes, which in most cases require a real-time response. Special target-oriented image quality indices are needed for military applications. In this paper, we propose the very such target-oriented normalized visibility, conspicuity, and saliency indices and corresponding methods for their measurements. Comparison of the times elapsed for the generation of saliency maps by the analyzed literature methods and the adequacy of the saliency scores produced by them with those for the saliency index, proposed in this paper, reveals that the computation with our approach is several orders of magnitude faster than for the prototype methods available in the literature while providing comparable adequacy of the measured target-oriented image quality indices.
Publisher
State Scientific Research Institute of Armament and Military Equipment Testing and Certification