Methods for Automated Identification of Informative Behaviors in Natural Bioptic Driving

Visually impaired people may legally drive if wearing bioptic telescopes in some developed countries. To address the controversial safety issue of the practice, we have developed a low-cost in-car recording system that can be installed in study participants´ own vehicles to record their daily driving activities. We also developed a set of automated identification techniques of informative behaviors to facilitate efficient manual review of important segments submerged in the vast amount of uncontrolled data. Here, we present the methods and quantitative results of the detection performance for six types of driving maneuvers and behaviors that are important for bioptic driving: bioptic telescope use, turns, curves, intersections, weaving, and rapid stops. The testing data were collected from one normally sighted and two visually impaired subjects across multiple days. The detection rates ranged from 82% up to 100%, and the false discovery rates ranged from 0% to 13%. In addition, two human observers were able to interpret about 80% of targets viewed through the telescope. These results indicate that with appropriate data processing the low-cost system is able to provide reliable data for natural bioptic driving studies.