Quantifying the Influence of Image Quality on Operator Reaction Times for Teleoperated Road Vehicles

Abstract

Teleoperated Driving (ToD) is a widely acknowledged concept applied to handle edge-case situations in automated vehicles. In ToD, a human operator judges and resolves these situations based on video streams. Due to varying network coverage, the compression level of these video streams and therefore the resulting image quality (IQ) are adjusted dynamically. In the presented work, the effect of IQ on task performance is investigated. We hypothesize that IQ impacts the operator’s reaction time to dynamic obstacles, and therefore influences safety. We conducted a user study to test this hypothesis. Subjective and objective data were collected. The results reveal that IQ has a significant influence on the operator’s task performance.