Experimental Study on Visual Recovery Time of Drivers after Super Glare

Abstract

With the rapid growth of vehicle ownership in China, more and more roads are equipped with road monitoring fill lights to regulate the driving behavior of drivers and ensure the accuracy and efficiency of public security law enforcement. According to the statistics of relevant departments, in recent years, the number of traffic accidents caused by the flicker interference of high brightness road monitoring fill light affecting the driver's vision, has increased by 12% annually in recent years. During driving, the difference between the high brightness of the fill light and the low brightness of the normal driving environment is too large after the driver is illuminated by the fill light during driving, resulting in the driver’s visual disability. The vision of driver can be divided into two stages from being stimulated to returning to normal, which are light adaptation stage and dark adaptation stage. In the restoration process, the time of dark adaptation was significantly longer than that of light adaptation. Based on the study of various factors such as brightness of fill light, illumination time of fill light and background brightness of road that affect the driver's vision in the process of dark adaptation, this paper concludes that, firstly, in the process of driver's pupil area recovering from the minimum pupil area after stimulation to the normal environment before stimulation, the pupil area changes regularly and rapidly when the minimum pupil area recovers to 80% of the normal, while the subsequent 20% pupil area fluctuates greatly and takes a long time to recover. Secondly, with the increase of the illumination time of the fill light, the visual recovery time of the driver increases first and then decreases. Thirdly, the change of the brightness of the fill light has great impact on the longest visual recovery time of the driver. This experiment aims to provide the relevant theoretical basis for the design and the improvement of the bad effect of the road fill light on the driver's vision