Keeping Track of Disappearing Vehicles: Understanding the Challenge of New Technologies and Emerging Micromobility

Motorists face the challenge that vehicles that move behind one another are temporarily hidden from view – termed “occlusion”. Occlusion is a complex computational challenge for visual perception because these vehicles disappear without ceasing to exist. Tracking an occluded vehicle therefore involves generating expectations about the vehicle’s likely real-time position, motion dynamics (e.g., whether it is accelerating or not), and expected reappearance. In general, humans are surprisingly good at tracking moving vehicles, even across periods of occlusion and this project will investigate how the human visual system solves this computational problem. This project will use a series of carefully-designed laboratory experiments, together with well-controlled, real-world stimuli, to systematically investigate how road users perceive and track different moving vehicles, including e-mobility devices.