004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
Refine
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
- Master's Thesis (1)
Keywords
- Eyetracking (2) (remove)
Institute
Einfluss eines Ausrichtungswerkzeugs auf die Bedienbarkeit in unbeaufsichtigten Eyetrackingsystemen
(2015)
Eye gaze trackers are devices that can estimate the direction of gaze of a person. Among usability testing eye tracking also allows persons with decreased limb mobility to control or to interact with the computer. The quality and availability of eye tracking equipment has been increasing while costs have been decreasing. This development leads to entering new markets by using eye tracking as an additional input dimension for a variety of applications. Up to now eye tracking has been supervised by qualified experts, who assured that the important conditions like position in front of the eye tracking device, calibration and light conditions has been kept, while using.
This thesis examines an adjustment tool, which is helping the user to adjust in front of the eye tracker and helping to keep this position during the experiment. Furthermore the accuracy while moving the head has been analysed. In this experiment an remote eye gaze tracker has been used to control a game character in the video game called 'Schau Genau!'. The goal was to determine whether the game is playable without the barrier of adjusting and calibration. The results show that adjusting in front of an eye tracker is not a problem, keeping this position is. Small changes of the head position after the calibration process leads to a lack of accuracy. Giving up the calibration and using someone else calibration shows way bigger deviation. Additional head movement increases error rate and makes controlling more difficult.
The availability of digital cameras and the possibility to take photos at no cost lead to an increasing amount of digital photos online and on private computers. The pure amount of data makes approaches that support users in the administration of the photo necessary. As the automatic understanding of photo content is still an unsolved task, metadata is needed for supporting administrative tasks like search or photo work such as the generation of photo books. Meta-information textually describes the depicted scene or consists of information on how good or interesting a photo is.
In this thesis, an approach for creating meta-information without additional effort for the user is investigated. Eye tracking data is used to measure the human visual attention. This attention is analyzed with the objective of information creation in the form of metadata. The gaze paths of users working with photos are recorded, for example, while they are searching for photos or while they are just viewing photo collections.
Eye tracking hardware is developing fast within the last years. Because of falling prices for sensor hardware such as cameras and more competition on the eye tracker market, the prices are falling, and the usability is increasing. It can be assumed that eye tracking technology can soon be used in everyday devices such as laptops or mobile phones. The exploitation of data, recorded in the background while the user is performing daily tasks with photos, has great potential to generate information without additional effort for the users.
The first part of this work deals with the labeling of image region by means of gaze data for describing the depicted scenes in detail. Labeling takes place by assigning object names to specific photo regions. In total, three experiments were conducted for investigating the quality of these assignments in different contexts. In the first experiment, users decided whether a given object can be seen on a photo by pressing a button. In the second study, participants searched for specific photos in an image search application. In the third experiment, gaze data was collected from users playing a game with the task to classify photos regarding given categories. The results of the experiments showed that gaze-based region labeling outperforms baseline approaches in various contexts. In the second part, most important photos in a collection of photos are identified by means of visual attention for the creation of individual photo selections. Users freely viewed photos of a collection without any specific instruction on what to fixate, while their gaze paths were recorded. By comparing gaze-based and baseline photo selections to manually created selections, the worth of eye tracking data in the identification of important photos is shown. In the analysis of the data, the characteristics of gaze data has to be considered, for example, inaccurate and ambiguous data. The aggregation of gaze data, collected from several users, is one suggested approach for dealing with this kind of data.
The results of the performed experiments show the value of gaze data as source of information. It allows to benefit from human abilities where algorithms still have problems to perform satisfyingly.