Soviet Visual Perception Research: Application to Target Acquisition Modeling

Abstract

Five Soviet books have been reviewed to ascertain how target acquisition was modeled in the former Soviet Union and to determine if information is sufficient to program a comprehensive model. Authors include V.D. Glezer and K.N. Dudicin of the Pavlov Institute of Physiology, St. Petersburg. Since the books (published between 1961 and 1985) were machine-translated from the Russian, some original concepts may have not been correctly interpreted. Still, they provide an excellent overview of 30 years of vision research at the Pavlov Institute and of Russian thought on vision and the brain. The Soviet texts emphasize cognitive mechanisms of vision more than is common in U.S. military models. Mental models and the observer's mindset are considered very important. More emphasis is given to modeling recognition and identification (versus detection) than in the U.S. The result of this study is a sketchy and incomplete search and target acquisition model, unsuitable for programming at present. The reviewed books mostly provide information about vision in general, with emphasis on proposed neurophysiological and psychological processes that may explain experimental results. They obviously were not written with computer programs in mind. Extensive data collection would be required to quantify the Soviet vision concepts for use in a computer model