Determination of Frame Rate Requirements for Videopanorama- based Virtual Towers using Visual Discrimination of Deceleration during Simulated Aircraft Landing: alternative analysis

Recent proposals for new air traffic control have suggested that advanced digital video technology may remove the need for air traffic controllers to be present in airport towers. In the future airport traffic in particular at small airports may be controlled from a remote location without the need for a physical tower building (Fürstenau & Schulz-Rueckert 2010). Since preliminary investigation of the role of visual features in tower operations has shown that their general function is to support anticipated separation by allowing controllers to predict future aircraft positions (Ellis & Liston, 2011), we have begun to investigate the effects of video frame rates (FR) on the decelerations cues used to anticipate whether a landing aircraft will be able to brake on a runway, as if to make a turn off before the runway end. Frame rate is an important system specification because it directly impacts the required communication bandwidth which can easily exceed 100 MB/s. Initial analysis based of a remote tower simulation study showed that the discriminability index d’ decreased with FR (Ellis et.al. 2011). Extrapolation via a model-based exponential fit indicated FR = 40 – 60 Hz to be required for minimizing decision error. Here we present an alternative analysis based on the nonparametric discriminability index A which may be thought of as the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristc (ROC) curve.