Gaze tracking measures can provide information about the spatial locus of attention of a behaving agent. Here we examine the looking behavior of helicopter pilots flying under visual meteorological conditions. The goal of the study is to correlate various types of looking behavior with pilots' accuracy in maintaining a precisely specified route, to support the formulation of new regulations and procedures. Eight pilots were instructed to fly a precision route specified by a series of waypoints. The geographic coordinates of the waypoints were entered into an onboard receiver of global positioning system (GPS) signals. Using a single 8mm videocassette, we recorded four video streams (30 frames per second), one audio stream, and GPS data sampled at 1 Hz. The four video streams were comprised of two cameras attached to the pilot's head, and two stationary cameras mounted on the aircraft. The head-mounted cameras consisted of a camera viewing the pilot's right eye through an infrared “hot” mirror, and a forward-looking scene camera located in front of the subject's forehead. From the eye images we compute estimates of head-relative gaze, while we obtain independent estimates of the head pose from the head-mounted scene camera and a stationary “face” camera. This talk will present an overview of the technical challenges encountered in the processing of the images, as well as preliminary results of the study.
Supported by FAA AAR-100, and the Airspace Operations Systems (AOS) project of NASA's Airspace Systems program.