Image Quality Equations and National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS)

The National Image Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS) defines quality in terms of the ability to extract information, or interpretability. The National Image Interpretability Rating Scale ratings can be used to communicate the intelligence potential or interpretability of an image. However, NIIRS is of little value to the system designer because it does not communicate in terms related to the system design. Similarly, although the NIIRS can be used to specify the desired interpretability of a requested image, it does not tell the system operator the physical operating parameters needed to collect the desired image.