DRIVER BEHAVIOR AND PERFORMANCE USING AN INFRARED NIGHT VISION ENHANCEMENT SYSTEM

Nighttime driving is unsafe due in part to the poor visibility of low contrast objects. Night Vision Enhancement Systems (NVES) offer a potential solution to this problem. However, there are concerns regarding driver distraction, object recognition, behavior compensation and direct vision impairments that need to be addressed. Incorporating lessons learned from a preliminary NVES study, crash analyses, and prior NVES research, a field experiment was designed to evaluate NVES. The evaluation used a 2000 Cadillac DeVille with Night Vision. Younger and Older drivers drove the vehicle along a predefined route on both public and closed roads. Targets consisted of traffic cones and pedestrians. All cones were heated and painted either black or white. Pedestrians wore either white or black clothing and were either stationary or waving their arms. Drivers were asked to provide separate detection and recognition responses for objects detected with headlights or indirectly via NVES and report speed limits