Intuitive visualization technique to support eye tracking data analysis: A user-study

Vsevolod Peysakhovich (1) , Christophe Hurter (2)

1 ISAE-SUPAERO - Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace
2 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

While fixation distribution is conventionally visualized using heat maps, there is still a lack of a commonly accepted technique to visualize saccade distributions. Inspired by wind maps and the Oriented Line Integral Convolution (OLIC) technique, we visualize saccades by drawing ink droplets which follow the direction indicated by a flow direction map. This direction map is computed using a kernel density estimation technique over the tangent directions to each saccade gaze point. The image is further blended with the corresponding heat map. It results in an animation or a static image showing main directions of the transitions between different areas of interest. We also present results from a web-based user study where naive non-expert users where asked to identify the direction of the flow and simple patterns. The results showed that these visu-alizations can successfully be used to support visual analysis of the eye-tracking data. It also showed that the use of animation allows to ease the task and to improve the performance.

Mots clés: Human-centered computing; Information visualization; Scanpath; visualization; flow directional map; Oriented Line Integral Convolution; Visualization techniques

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Vsevolod Peysakhovich, Christophe Hurter. Intuitive visualization technique to support eye tracking data analysis: A user-study. ETVIS’18: 3rd Workshop on Eye Tracking and Visualization, Jun 2018, Varsovie, Poland. ⟨10.1145/3205929.3205939⟩. ⟨hal-01799477⟩