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FocalVid : Facilitating Remote Studies of Video Saliency

Authors:
Sahand Shaghaghi
Bryan Tripp
Chrystopher Nehaniv
Alexander Mois Aroyo
Kerstin Dautenhahn

Keywords: eye tracking; visual saliency; video saliency; mouse- contingent interface; Web design.

Abstract:
Humans selectively use only a small fraction of the vast sensory data that arrives at their receptors. In vision, eye movements are an important part of this selection process. Eye movements arise from interacting bottom-up and top-down factors, including social factors, and they provide important infor- mation about cognitive processes. Tracking eye movements often requires very specialized hardware that is suitable for laboratory based studies, but less practical for online studies with remote participants. Recently, a proxy for eye movements was introduced, which facilitates large online studies of overt attention. In this approach, participants’ mouse-clicks reveal parts of a static image sequentially. Mouse-click locations can be recorded accurately and reliably, without the need for a calibration procedure, and mouse-click locations were found to correlate strongly with gaze locations. However, while eye movements are often studied using static scenes, they are also affected by motion cues, and by more complex task-related dynamics. To facilitate the online study of such influences, we adapted the mouse-based approach to dynamic scenes, by continuously recording the location of the mouse cursor, and continuously revealing only part of the display surrounding the cursor. While our platform has been developed primarily to support large, remote video saliency studies, the same approach could be used to study overt attention, e.g., in computer games, or to study more complex interactions, such as co-operative tasks performed over video chat. This paper describes our platform, FocalVid, which will be made open-source on acceptance.

Pages: 471 to 477

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: March 22, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-761-0

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from November 21, 2020 to November 25, 2020