A Probabilistic Model for Visual Driver Gaze Approximation from Head Pose Estimation

The direction of a vehicle driver’s visual attention plays an essential role in the research on Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. How a driver monitors the surrounding environment is at least partially descriptive of the driver’s situational awareness. While driver gaze is not explicitly related to head pose due to the interplay between head and eye movements, it may still provide an approximation of the visual attention that is sufficiently accurate for many applications. In this research, we propose a probabilistic method for describing the visual attention of drivers. This method applies a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) technique that estimates the probability of the driver gaze direction, given head pose. We evaluate our model on real data collected during drives with an experimental vehicle in urban and suburban areas. Our experimental results show that 82.5% of drivers’ gaze lies within the 95% confidence interval predicted by our framework.