Suppressing external visual distractors from driver’s field of view

Driver inattention is one of the factors in many car crash or near-crash incidents. This inattention can be caused by distractors that force the driver to look away from the forward roadway. In this paper, we focused on external distractors, namely static billboards. We proposed two methods that suppress the visibility of the billboard - Wiped method, which covers the billboard with black content and Transparent method, which makes the billboard 90% transparent. In the following study with 10 participants, we observed that the wiped method was more successful in suppressing the driver’s attention to the billboard than transparent method. Participants spent in average 0.42 seconds looking at one wiped billboard compared to 0.89 seconds spent looking at one transparent billboard. The Wiped method was also favored by participants in post-test subjective rating.