Identifying objects in images from analyzing the users' gaze movements for provided tags

Abstract

Assuming that eye tracking will be a common input device in the near future in notebooks and mobile devices like iPads, it is possible to implicitly gain information about images and image regions from these users' gaze movements. In this paper, we investigate the principle idea of finding specific objects shown in images by looking at the users' gaze path information only. We have analyzed 547 gaze paths from 20 subjects viewing different image-tag-pairs with the task to decide if the tag presented is actually found in the image or not. By analyzing the gaze paths, we are able to correctly identify 67% of the image regions and significantly outperform two baselines. In addition, we have investigated if different regions of the same image can be differentiated by the gaze information. Here, we are able to correctly identify two different regions in the same image with an accuracy of 38%. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.