Analysis of Drivers' Gaze Behavior on Winding Roads

Masafumi Hisada (1751099)


Modeling of drivers' gaze is important to understand driving behaviors since we can predict the steering behaviors. Although there are many studies in simulated/natural situations, most of them focus on analyzing the gaze behavior in a single curve.

In this thesis, we extend these studies to a natural situation, where roads are winding, and aim to investigate how gaze moves during driving on winding roads. Based on a conventional model called the tangent point (TP) model, drivers gaze at near TP on winding roads and may move their gaze points jump from the front TP to the back one. To test the behavior, we collected real gaze data during driving on winding roads and analyzed their properties. Since there are multiple TPs in winding roads, we also take eye movements between TPs into account.

As a result, the vertical position of the gaze did not correlate to the time while the horizontal position did, and drivers' eye movements were not saccades but like smooth pursuits. It implies that drivers' gaze does not jump from one TP to the next one. These results provide a new insight that we cannot express the gaze model on winding roads using the merely connecting two TP models, and also have to consider the gaze transition between two TPs.