Preparatory coordination of head, eyes and hands: Experimental study at intersections

Drivers use some combination of head, eye and hand movements to perform varying number of tasks from driving related to non-driving secondary tasks. Furthermore, the combinations may vary depending on the task performed. It is important to model and understand these variations in order to build predictive systems, explore driving styles, detect activities, etc. This study, therefore, introduces a framework to model the spatio-temporal movements of head, eyes and hands given naturalistic driving data of looking-in at the driver for any events or tasks performed of interest. As a use case, we explore the temporal coordination of the modalities on data of drivers executing maneuvers at stop-controlled intersections; the maneuvers executed are go straight, turn left and turn right. In sequentially increasing time windows, by training classifiers which have the ability to provide discriminative quality of its input variable, the experimental study at intersections shows which type of, when and how long distinguishable preparatory movements occur in the range of a few milliseconds to a few seconds.