When do Saccades begin? Prediction of Saccades as a Time-to-Event Problem

Abstract

We present a novel view on gaze event classification by redefining it as a time-to-event problem. In contrast to previous models, which consider the classification as discrete events, our redefinition allows for estimating the remaining time until the next saccade event. Therefore, we provide a feature analysis and an initial solution for compensating the latency of wearable eye-trackers build in today's head-mounted displays. Similar to previous classifiers, we utilize oculomotor features such as velocity, acceleration, and event durations. In total, we analyze 104 extracted features of three datasets and apply different regression methods. We identify optimal window sizes for each feature and extract the importance of all extracted windows using recursive feature elimination. Afterwards, we evaluate the performance of all regressors using earlier selected features. We show that our selected regressors can predict the time-to-event better than the baseline, indicating the potential usage of time-to-event prediction of saccades.