A Comparative Study of Fixation Density Maps

Ulrich Engelke (1) , Hantao Liu (2) , Junle Wang (3) , Patrick Le Callet (3) , Ingrid Heynderickx (1) , Hans-Jürgen Zepernick (4) , Anthony Maeder (5)

1 Philips Research Laboratories [Eindhoven]
2 TU Delft - Delft University of Technology
3 irccyn-ivc
4 Blekinge Institute of Technology
5 Health informatics

Fixation density maps (FDM) created from eye tracking experiments are widely used in image processing applications. The FDM are assumed to be reliable ground truths of human visual attention and as such one expects high similarity between FDM created in different laboratories. So far, no studies have analysed the degree of similarity between FDM from independent laboratories and the related impact on the applications. In this paper, we perform a thorough comparison of FDM from three independently conducted eye tracking experiments. We focus on the effect of presentation time and image content and evaluate the impact of the FDM differences on three applications: visual saliency modelling, image quality assessment, and image retargeting. It is shown that the FDM are very similar and that their impact on the applications is low. The individual experiment comparisons, however, are found to be significantly different, showing that inter-laboratory differences strongly depend on the experimental conditions of the laboratories. The FDM are publicly available to the research community.

Mots clés: Eye tracking; fixation density maps; inter-laboratory differences; visual attention

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Ulrich Engelke, Hantao Liu, Junle Wang, Patrick Le Callet, Ingrid Heynderickx, et al.. A Comparative Study of Fixation Density Maps. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2013, 22 (3), pp.1121-1133. ⟨10.1109/TIP.2012.2227767⟩. ⟨hal-00757423⟩