This report details activities of a research project directed at the quantification of visual complexity of night driving scenes. Five laboratory experiments (using photographic slides) and a field study provided data on the difficulty of interpreting behind-the-wheel scenes. These included measures of subjective judgment, temporal and eye-movement aspects of scene viewing, and instrumented vehicle data on vehicle dynamics and driver behavior. A simplified mathematical model of global scene "instability" was developed and evaluated as an objective measure of scene complexity. The model analysis is based on the gray-scale values of digitized scene images.
Samenvatting