UAV Imagery Frame Rate and Resolution Requirements Study

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used to conduct a variety of reconnaissance and surveillance missions with human operators interpreting the transmitted imagery at ground stations. Current UAV datalink designs require a limited capacity which are expected to result in some cost to the operator. Two common techniques by which video data rates can be reduced exist, data compression and simple data reduction such as frame rate and resolution reduction. This study utilized real mission imagery to assess the influence of experience and training, compression, frame rate reduction, and spatial resolution reduction on operator detection, recognition and tracking performance for military targets. The comparisons between the control group and other conditions under both frame rate and resolution manipulations demonstrated how data reduction techniques adversely influence operator performance. Additional analyses demonstrated that for some tasks, frame rate has a greater influence on some performance measures, and resolution has a greater influence on other performance measures. In addition to the real imagery study, an analysis of operator performance under simulated tracking conditions was also performed... Human Factors, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAV, Video imagery, Limited capacity datalink, Video data compression, Frame rate and resolution reduction, Target detection recognition and tracking performance, Simulation, JTIDS, JPEG.