Target detection in urban clutter

Experiments were conducted to determine the influence of urban background clutter on observer target detection performance. Tests consisted of measuring observer ability to find tank targets in synthetic images displayed on a TV monitor. Results were measured in terms of detection probability versus false alarm probability for various spatial resolutions and clutter levels. The results were compared to those from previous measurements made with rural clutter. The comparison showed that, contrary to expectations, better performance was obtained in urban clutter. It was postulated that the contextual cues of urban background clutter aided the observer screening process. The need for a better clutter definition and further research to generalize the results to a larger population of images is discussed