Simulation-based Performance Modeling for War Fighter in Loop Minefield Detection System

There has been significant recent interest in airborne reconnaissance for target detection using high resolution airborne images collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Even if automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms are able to produce satisfactory results in terms of probability of detection for certain false alarm rate, there is a need for a warfighter-in-the-loop (WIL) to reduce false alarms further and verify and validate detections to attain the operational performance requirements. We develop a simulation model to assess effectiveness of the warfighter in decision loop for airborne minefield detection. The war-fighter effectiveness is measured in terms of average waiting-time, number of minefield segments in queue, and the expected false alarms, and missed detection. Various parameters which potentially affect the warfighter performance were identified with the help of prior studies with human operator in laboratory settings. Simulation trials were conducted to evaluate the dependence of these parameters on warfighter performance