Investigating Affective Responses toward In-Video Pedestrian Crossing Actions using Camera and Physiological Sensors

Automatically inferring drivers’ emotions during driver-pedestrian interactions to improve road safety remains a challenge for designing in-vehicle, empathic interfaces. To that end, we carried out a lab-based study using a combination of camera and physiological sensors. We collected participants’ (N=21) real-time, affective (emotion self-reports, heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance, and facial temperatures) responses towards non-verbal, pedestrian crossing videos from the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset. Our findings reveal that positive, non-verbal, pedestrian crossing actions in the videos elicit higher valence ratings from participants, while non-positive actions elicit higher arousal. Different pedestrian crossing actions in the videos also have a significant influence on participants’ physiological signals (heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance) and facial temperatures. Our findings provide a first step toward enabling in-car empathic interfaces that draw on behavioural and physiological sensing to in situ infer driver emotions during non-verbal pedestrian interactions.