Vision Research

The visual performance studies started in the late 1960’s and continued at least until the late 1980’s. They included extensive surveys & experimental data related to the effects of a wide range of parameters on detection threshold trends for foveal viewing. These included object size, shape & contrast against surroundings, scene brightness (within the photopic & mesopic brightness range), image sharpness (including specific effects as related to the human eyeball viewing through a range of optical sighting systems), chromatic contrast effects, random noise, 1-D & 2-D discrete sampling, local image motion and local stereoscopic effects.

More limited studies were also carried out for viewing using peripheral vision and on higher level visual thresholds relating to recognition & identification of objects. The result was a very compact multi-parametric mathematical predictive model of human visual performance covering most photopic viewing situations, both for foveal and peripheral viewing.

In addition, substantial studies were carried out on the modelling of visual lobes and, from this, the modelling of visual search in several reasonably definable circumstances.