Binocular Vision in Military Aviation
@ Defence Research & Development Canada
A three year collaborative research project with Defence Research and Development Canada and York University. The aim was to evaluate the requirements for binocular vision in military aviation by identifying candidate tasks that depend on stereopsis.
Background & Goals
Despite a long history of research regarding the contribution of binocular vision and stereoscopic depth perception to flight-based tasks, there is no consensus on its operational relevance. The goal of the project was to determine the necessity of stereoscopic vision requirements for Canadian Air Forces (CAF) aircrew by assessing the operational relevance of stereopsis in a variety of simulated flight tasks. Key goals include:
Research Goals
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Interview military pilots and flight engineers to identify potential candidate flight tasks that depend on stereopsis
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Determine the operational relevance of stereopsis in each flight task by designing and executing carefully controlled simulated flight scenarios
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Flight tasks include: (1) Altitude estimation, (2) Low hover rotary wing altitude estimation, and (3) Judgments of ground terrain during landing.
Methods
I collaborated with a cross-functional team, including defence research scientists and academic researchers to conceptualize, design, and execute the studies with strict ethics, operating procedures, and regulatory practices required for the assessment of military aircrew. In the first phase, we conducted informal interviews of military pilots and flight engineers to determine their experiences with demanding flight scenarios that could depend on binocular vision and use that information to inform the study design.
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Our team designed three studies to assess the flight tasks identified during the interview process. Each study used either (1) real stereoscopic imagery captured from a helicopter training exercise, (2) simulated a low hover altitude judgment scenario using high-resolution stereoscopic imagery, or (3) simulated a ground terrain shape judgment task using naturalistic imagery.
Figure 1: Illustration of ground terrain scenario
Crucial Insights
This project determined that stereopsis was critical for altitude judgments during low hover and judgments of ground terrain during landing.
We found that binocular vision was beneficial for experienced aircrew and inexperienced undergraduate participants without aviation training. However, aircrew were more accurate than undergraduate participants when estimating the altitude of a virtual helicopter under monocular viewing, which likely reflects the impact of training on the ability to interpret monocular depth cues.
We determined that binocular vision was critical for judgments of ground terrain at large viewing distances up to 9m. However, a large proportion of participants demonstrated a strong convexity bias, which suggests that there are individual differences in the reliance on assumptions of surface curvature that must be considered in experimental conditions.
Research Impact
Strategic Impact
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This project resulted in significant improvements for pilot performance by updating the binocular vision requirements during vision screening for pilots in the CAF.
My Learnings
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​Gained valuable insight regarding conducting studies with a large multidisciplinary team
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Learned how to develop a study under strict regulations of the DRDC for testing on military aircrew
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Learned that military aircrew are extremely competitive even when conducting a perceptual experiment that does not measure objective performance