Simulating the effects of laser dazzle on human vision

A simplified model of human vision has been integrated with a laser dazzle model in order to gain insight into the degradation in human visual performance under dazzle conditions. A computational model of space-variant vision, that incorporates the foveated structure of the retina sampled by a standard machine-vision feature extraction mechanism, is used as the basis of the simulations. This model allows visualization of saccadic targeting and feature extraction during the identification of simple objects from static imagery. After a baseline performance is established for the identification of a vehicle within an image, a laser dazzle spot is superimposed onto the image based upon the standard CIE equation for disability glare. Initial results indicate that the impact of laser dazzle on human vision can be further understood by using this model to visualize and quantify the degradation in visual performance under laser exposure.