Perceptually optimum gray-scale transformation of multibin time history data

Gray-scale displays of a time history of data in multiple channels are encountered in various applications. The signal tracks in a noisy display often have to be detected by a human operator. To exploit the pattern-recognition capability of the human “receiver”, the perceptual factors influencing visual discrimination needs to be incorporated into the gray-scale transformation scheme of the data. To this end, an objective function, viz. the total perceived entropy, is proposed in this paper for optimum gray-scale quantizer design. Two types of quantizers, one designed with unconstrained maximization of the objective function and another which maximizes the objective function with the constraint enforced by Weber´s law, are proposed. It is demonstrated, using simulated spectrogram data, that these quantizers provide better signal track discrimination than Lloyd-Max quantization