Background: The Federal Aviation Administration is evaluating the potential benefits of weather information overlaid on the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) radar display. The study's objective was to validate a background masking metric to assist display designers to identify good color combinations for an air traffic control weather radar display.
Methods: A uniform gray pattern and two weather radar displays were used as the background for randomly selected aircraft data text blocks (varying luminance levels) positioned in eight fixed locations around a central location. Observers' task was to search for the data text block that matched the text block presented in the central location. Three text contrast levels were used for the uniform background and two levels were used for each of the weather radar backgrounds.
Results: For each of the four weather radar conditions, we estimated the uniform background contrast that would give the same performance for percent correct and latency.
Conclusions: A simple luminance contrast masking metric is a fairly good predictor of the masking of the text blocks by the colored weather map backgrounds.
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