Study On The Visual Physiology Of Driver Safety In Urban Traffic Condition

As the main actor of driving behavior, the driver obtains the traffic informationmainly from vision. The driver’s visual changes are also different under different roadconditions. Most of the urban road traffic accidents occur in the sections orintersections where traffic flow is heavy. In the driving process, the driver’s perceptionof dangerous sections affects driving safety directly. The driver’s perception andreaction will be reflected by changes of eye movement. So, the driver’s variation ofeye movement test were designed under the different road conditions to collect eyemovement data, to analyze the relationship between the driver’s eye movementchanges and to find the driver’s variation of eye movement during the driving processin the different road environments. It is very important to provide a theoretical basisfor the evaluation of road safety.The field driving test and virtual driving test were designed based on the researchat home and abroad. The eye tracker was used to collect the driver’s visualcharacteristic data. In the virtual driving test, the experienced drivers and theinexperienced drivers were selected to test on the same route and collect the eyemovement data. In the field driving test, the experienced drivers were chosen only.The video recorded the entire process for the road conditions. The monitors mark thetime of the turning, traffic lights and speed humps emphatically in the driving process.Dealing with the collected eye movement data, get the changed graphics of blinkfrequency, blink duration and visual fixation point accurately. Depending on thegraphical variation, analyze the relationship between the road conditions and thechange of eye movements, find out the law of similarities and differences in the fielddriving and virtual driving.Experimental results of the analysis data showed that the variation of the driver’seye movement is similar both in the field driving test and virtual driving test. Thedriver’s blink duration relate to the traffic environment, when traveling in complexroad environment, the frequency of driver’s blink increases and the blink duration decreases. The change of driver’s eye movement relate to the driving experiences. Inthe virtual driving, experienced driver’s blink frequency is lower than theinexperienced driver’s and the blink duration is longer, and the experienced driver’svisual fixation focuses mainly in the horizontal direction, inexperienced driver’s visualfixations focuses in the vertical direction mainly.