Please join us for the NZSSE AGM 2022 to hear about what the Society has achieved since February 2021, what is coming up over the next 12 months and how you can get involved.

The AGM will be followed by a presentation on the "Use of eye tracking in visual inspection for defects" by Professor Dirk Pons.

Use of eye tracking in visual inspection for defects
Prof Dirk Pons (CPEng, IntPE, FEngNZ, PhD, Tohunga Wetepanga)

According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), one of the top three causes for aircraft accidents are maintenance and inspection errors. The inspection is predominately performed by human operators and thus there is an inherent risk of human error. In this research project, conducted by PhD candidate Jonas Aust at the University of Canterbury, eye tracking was applied to understand the search strategies of different levels of operator expertise. Eye tracking revealed that inspectors used an underlying search strategy characterised by edge detection and differentiation between surface deposits and other types of damage, which contributed to better performance. The results show the importance of the visual locus in the search phase, i.e., the specific search strategy for the preferred retinal locus that the operator selects (perhaps unconsciously) to guide their eye movements. We propose a revised Visual Inspection Framework that better includes the Inspection Errors discovered through the eye tracking studies.