Visual displays are key components of information, communication, and computing systems.
Because of the large information bandwidth required for image-based communication, displays are frequently performance bottlenecks for such systems. Display design may, therefore, determine the degree of success of such systems. The key aspect of a successful display design is the specification of meaningfully quantifiable and measurable objectives.
To be most relevant for a given application, these objectives should be based on the ability of an operator to perform his task.
Such task-based objectives can be used to evaluate systems, and to optimize the display parameters.
Given a quantitative, task-based performance measure, it is, in principle, possible to optimize the display by the brute-force approach of designing prototypes with different set of parameters and measuring the performance empirically.
This chapter presents and advocates an alternative approach that is to construct models of human operators and of display system, and to use these models to evaluate image quality (IQ) metrics with respect to task-based objectives.