Usability of Pilot´s Gaze in Aeronautic Cockpit for Safer Aircraft

With increasing complexity of aircraft equipment, the demands on the aircraft crew are unprecedented. The modern cockpit must adjust its pace of communication for optimal workload of the crew and ensure that the information presented to the pilot is actually received. We contribute to the solution of these problems by designing a passive (purely video-based and unobtrusive) gaze tracking solution. It allows for detection of the pilot missing a piece of information communicated by the cockpit equipment, and for estimation of pilot´s workload and immediate focus. We collected a dataset at an aeronautic simulator by using the OptiTrack tracking equipment for development and evaluation of similar gaze tracking systems and we make it publicly available. The experiments show that proposed algorithms for passive and unobtrusive gaze estimation work satisfactorily for the targeted purposes.