Analysis of relationship between characteristics of driver's eye movements and visual scene in driving events

It has been reported in many papers that the number of eye movements increases and the mean fixation durations on individual objects decreases when the road situation becomes more complex. In this paper eye-movement analysis has been used for understanding the mechanism of visual search of drivers. For the aim, two experiments in which the subjects drove the driving simulators have been conducted. We analyzed the relationship between the eye movement of drivers and the characteristics of their front scenes while driving in driving conditions. In the first experiment it was confirmed that the frequency of saccade became higher and fixation time became shorter in case of the turn event condition among three driving events, where the pixel difference extracted as the visual information from the driver's front scene became larger. In the second experiment the same relationship between the characteristics of eye movements and the driver's front scenes were confirmed by considering the three driving events, running straight, turning corners at a crossing and prediction task of hazard in the urban course. The pixel difference of the driver's front scene influenced the eye movements while driving. These results of experiments about driver's cognitive processing while driving suggested that eye movements depends on the amount of information contained in the front scene defined by the pixel difference.