Can a Driver Assistance System Determine if a Driver is Perceiving a Pedestrian? - Consideration of the Driver's Visual Adaptation to Illumination Change

We propose an estimation method of pedestrian detectability considering the driver’s visual adaptation to illumination change. Since it is important for driver assistance systems to determine if a driver is perceiving a pedestrian or not, estimation of pedestrian detectability by the driver is required. However, previous studies do not consider drastic illumination changes that degrades the detection performance by the driver. We assumed that driver’s visual characteristics change in proportion to the adaptation period after illumination change. Therefore we constructed estimators corresponding to different adaptation periods, and estimated the pedestrian detectability by switching them according to the period. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed an experimental environment to present a subject with illumination changes and conducted an experiment to measure and estimate the pedestrian detectability according to the adaptation period. Results showed that the proposed method could estimate the pedestrian detectability accurately after the illumination changed drastically.