Guiding Eye Movements for Better Communication and Augmented Vision

Abstract

Abstract. This paper briefly summarises our results on gaze guidance such as to complement the demonstrations that we plan to present at the workshop. Our goal is to integrate gaze into visual communication systems by measuring and guiding eye movements. Our strategy is to predict a set of about ten salient locations and then change the probability for one of these candidates to be attended: for one candidate the probability is increased, for the others it is decreased. To increase saliency, in our current implementation, we show a natural-scene movie and overlay red dots very briefly such that they are hardly perceived consciously. To decrease the probability, for example, we locally reduce the temporal frequency content of the movie. We here present preliminary results, which show that the three steps of our above strategy are feasible. The long-term goal is to find the optimal real-time video transformation that minimises the difference between the actual and the desired eye movements without being obtrusive. Applications are in the area of vision-based communication, augmented vision, and learning.

Scan path entropy and arrow plots: capturing scanning behavior of multiple observers

“…Humans seem to be good eye trackers themselves, it is well known that gaze direction of one person is a strong cue for another person to direct attention (and gaze) to the gazed at location (Frischen et al, 2007 ). There are also attempts to actively guide gaze to certain locations by subtle visual cues (Barth et al, 2006a , b ; McNamara et al, 2008 ). Magicians point with their hands and use their gaze and beautiful assistants to distract the audiences gaze from the actual locations where they do the trick.…”

Gaze-Contingent Spatio-temporal Filtering in a Head-Mounted Display

“…Our work, however, focuses on the guidance of eye movements [5], and so we are interested in the effect that foveation has on the observer's eye movements. Based on the observation that movement or change in the visual periphery is a strong cue for eye movements, we have extended the techniques used by [2] such that they also filter in the temporal domain.…”

Orienting during gaze guidance in a letter-identification task

“…The aim of gaze guidance is to support the viewer during visual inspection of his/her environment by giving suggestions of where to look (Barth et al, 2006a(Barth et al, , 2006b). Gaze guidance is potentially applicable in situations where the viewer is confronted with a large visual display (or visual field), which needs to be searched for specific information, e.g.…”

“…For simpler types of movies or scenes, guidance needs to be implemented afterward. To pursue this ambitious goal, Barth et al apply a transformationbased on the Tensor product -, which increases the saliency at image locations that are supposed to attract gaze, and which decreases the saliency at those locations that are to be ignored by the viewer (Barth et al, 2006a(Barth et al, , 2006b. Thus, the marker is not confined to a local area, but can be understood as a global 'lead' generated by the image transformations.…”