Eyes on the Road: A Naturalistic Comparison of MTW Rider Gaze in Urban Indian Traffic

Prerak Srivastava, Bhaiya Vaibhaw Kumar, Kavita Vemuri

Motorized two-wheelers (MTW) dominate Indian roads but remain underrepresented in driver behavior research. This study presents the first large-scale analysis of MTW driver gaze behavior in naturalistic, heterogeneous urban traffic, using the \textit{myEye2Wheeler} dataset. A semantic segmentation pipeline (YOLOv11 + SAM2) was used to extract object-level gaze metrics under two attention modes: direct gaze (foveal overlap) and central vision (parafoveal monitoring). Results reveal a functional division: central vision supports broad monitoring, while direct gaze enables brief, selective sampling. Novice riders exhibit road-anchored scanning, returning to the road between object fixations, while experienced riders form longer chains of attention across multiple objects. The findings suggest that experience primarily refines temporal rhythm rather than altering allocation strategy and reduces object-class effects in gaze patterns. These findings offer new insight into MTW attention structures and inform future work on behavior modeling and safety systems.