Modeling static and dynamic detection of humans in rural terrain

Historically, the focus of detection experiments and modeling at the Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD) has been on detecting military vehicles in rural terrains. A gap remains in understanding the detection of human targets in rural terrains and how it might differ from detection of vehicles. There are also improvements that can be made in how to quantify the effect of human movement on detectability. Two experiments were developed to look at probability of detection and time to detect fully exposed human targets in a low to moderate clutter environment in the infrared waveband. The first test uses static images of standing humans while the second test uses videos of humans walking across the scene at various ranges and speeds. Various definitions of target and background areas are explored to calculated contrast and target size. Ultimately, task difficulty parameters (V50s) are calculated to calibrate NVESD sensor performance models, specifically NVThermIP and NV-IPM, for the human detection task. The focus of the analysis in this paper is primarily on the static detection task since the analysis for the dynamic detection experiment is still in the early stages. Results will be presented as well as a plan for future work in this area.