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Visual search analysis using parametric fixations

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Abstract

Eye movement analysis has been an important area of research. The analysis of eye movements could help in better understanding of human preferences, behavioral pattern and viewing sequences. Eye movement analysis involves scanpath tracking which is the path traversed by movement of eyes. Scanpath comprises of two major components that are fixations and saccades. Fixations are the common events studied for understanding behavioral tendencies whereas saccades have generally been referred as corrective random eye movements that cannot contribute to human behavioral understanding. The constant viewing of a region or an object in a visual scene for a certain period of time is termed as fixation that has been generally analyzed in terms of associated parameters. The most common parameters analyzed include, number of fixations and duration of fixations. The analysis of fixations has been a part of many research areas that include scene perception, visual search, marketing, diagnostic and interactive applications. Visual search has been a prominent research area wherein a given target objects is to be found amidst group of distracters in a displayed scene/image. The distractions could be due to presence of similar looking objects, low variation of color or higher number of heterogeneous objects. In this paper, fixations have been analyzed in terms of different fixation parameters during experiments of visual search. A total of three experiments of visual search have been conducted. The experiments have been conducted in a sequence, for understanding the impact of distractions during visual search on parameters of fixations and thereby eye movements. The identified parameters include ‘number of fixations, ‘total fixation duration’, ‘maximum fixation duration’ and ‘total search time’. A total of three distractions present in images i.e. low chromatic variation, presence of multiple heterogeneous objects and high target- distracter similarity have been analyzed. Eye movement data of forty one subjects has been captured using a remote eye tracking setup. It has been found that visual images with high target and non target object similarity have higher impact on fixation parameters and thus eye movements. The distractions in the form of low chromatic variations and presence of multiple heterogenic objects in images have almost similar impact on eye movements. The results indicate that searching in images with high similarity between target and non target objects has been difficult for subjects in comparison to images with high heterogenic component and low chromatic variation. Also, result of parameter (maximum fixation duration) shows different results on images that have been easy for subjects to search, in comparison to difficult visual search. The obtained results could lead to better development and optimization of user oriented applications using remote eye tracking systems.

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  1. Department of Computer Science & IT, University of Jammu (J&K), Jammu, India

    Mohsina Ishrat & Pawanesh Abrol

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  1. Mohsina Ishrat
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  2. Pawanesh Abrol
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Correspondence to Mohsina Ishrat.

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Ishrat, M., Abrol, P. Visual search analysis using parametric fixations. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 10007–10022 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-12377-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-12377-2

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