Using Designed Structure of Visual Content to Understand Content-Browsing Behavior

Abstract

SUMMARYStudies on gaze analysis have revealed some of the relationships between viewers' gaze and their internal states (e.g., interests and intentions). However, understanding content browsing behavior in uncontrolled environments is still challenging because human gaze can be very complex; it is affected not only by viewers' states but also by the spatiosemantic structures of visual content. This study proposes a novel gaze analysis framework which introduces the content creators' point of view to understand the meaning of browsing behavior. Visual content such as web pages, digital articles and catalogs are comprised of structures intentionally designed by content creators, which we refer to as designed structure. This paper focuses on two design factors of designed structure: spatial structure of content elements (content layout), and their relationships such as "being in the same group". The framework was evaluated with an experiment involving 12 participants, wherein the participant's state was estimated from their gaze behavior. The results from the experiment show that the use of design structure improved estimation accuracies of user states compared to other baseline methods.

Estimation of browsing states in consumer decision processes from eye movements

“…In [4], the versatility of the use of designed structure is confirmed by using multiple types of layouts. In this paper, we focus on analysis of the sequence of encoded gaze features.…”

“…We employ designed structure proposed in [4] to encode eye movements into gaze features. The designed structure can be represented as follows.…”

“…To incorporate (1), we use the designed structure of digital catalogs to encode eye movements into a sequence of gaze features. Designed structure, as proposed in [4], is high-level content structure that reflects the designer's point of view, such as groupings of items. Instead of using semantic attributes of items, the designed structure employs embedded semantic information as a content layout.…”

A probabilistic approach for eye-tracking based process tracing in catalog browsing

“…12. Eye movements are first encoded to a sequence of gaze features using a semantic structure of the catalog, called designed structure (Ishikawa, Kawashima, & Matsuyama, 2015). Designed structure is high-level content structure that reflects the designer's point of view such as groupings of items.…”

“…The versatility of the use of designed structure is confirmed by using multiple types of layouts (Ishikawa et al, 2015). This paper focuses on analysis of the sequence of encoded gaze features.…”