Target acquisition performance in the presence of JPEG image compression

This paper presents an investigation on the effect of JPEG compression on the similarity between the target image and the background, where the similarity is further used to determine the degree of clutter in the image. Four new clutter metrics based on image quality assessment are introduced, among which the Haar wavelet-based perceptual similarity index, known as HaarPSI, provides the best target acquisition prediction results. It is shown that the similarity between the target and the background at the boundary between visually lossless and visually lossy compression does not change significantly compared to the case when an uncompressed image is used. In future work, through subjective tests, it is necessary to check whether this presence of compression at the threshold of just noticeable differences will affect the human target acquisition performance. Similarity values are compared with the results of subjective tests of the well-known target Search＿2 database, where the degree of agreement between objective and subjective scores, measured through linear correlation, reached a value of 90%.