Abstract
Non-verbal communication, such as eye contact between drivers and pedestrians, has been regarded as one way to reduce accident risk. So far, studies have assumed rather than objectively measured the occurrence of eye contact. We address this research gap by developing an eye contact detection method and testing it in an indoor experiment with scripted driver–pedestrian interactions at a pedestrian crossing. Thirty participants acted as a pedestrian either standing on an imaginary curb or crossing an imaginary one-lane road in front of a stationary vehicle with an experimenter in the driver’s seat. In half of the trials, pedestrians were instructed to make eye contact with the driver; in the other half, they were prohibited from doing so. Both parties’ gaze was recorded using eye trackers. An in-vehicle stereo camera recorded the car’s point of view, a head-mounted camera recorded the pedestrian’s point of view, and the location of the driver’s and pedestrian’s eyes was estimated using image recognition. We demonstrate that eye contact can be detected by measuring the angles between the vector joining the estimated location of the driver’s and pedestrian’s eyes, and the pedestrian’s and driver’s instantaneous gaze directions, respectively, and identifying whether these angles fall below a threshold of 4°. We achieved 100% correct classification of the trials involving eye contact and those without eye contact, based on measured eye contact duration. The proposed eye contact detection method may be useful for future research into eye contact.
Highlights
In 2018, there were over 300,000 pedestrian deaths worldwide [1]
There is no marked difference in the curves in terms of the number of data points, which can be explained by the fact that the driver was not asked to adjust his gaze behavior based on the eye contact seeking behavior of the pedestrian
There was more eye contact in the crossing trials compared to the standing trials, because the driver continuously tracked the pedestrian in the former case, whereas in the latter case, he only briefly sought eye contact with the pedestrian and looked away, and repeated this process thrice
Summary
In 2018, there were over 300,000 pedestrian deaths worldwide [1]. Studies have shown that pedestrian fatalities are growing by the year, especially on urban roads [2], and that most pedestrian casualties occur during the act of street crossing [3]. The effect of eye contact on pedestrians. Through interviews and on-site observations [6,7] and recordings of natural driving scenes [7,8,9], it has been shown that a sizeable percentage of pedestrians use eye contact to negotiate right of way when crossing the road. Studies have investigated pedestrians’ responses to automated vehicles without a driver making eye contact Malmsten Lundgren et al found that most pedestrians were willing to cross the road when there was eye contact with the driver, whereas only a few were willing when the driver of the automated vehicle was inattentive. Chang et al [15], for example, tested a novel eHMI with dynamic eyes on the car
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