Behavioral Activity Recognition Based on Gaze Ethograms

Noninvasive behavior observation techniques allow more natural human behavior assessment experiments with higher ecological validity. We propose the use of gaze ethograms in the context of user interaction with a computer display to characterize the user's behavioral activity. A gaze ethogram is a time sequence of the screen regions the user is looking at. It can be used for the behavioral modeling of the user. Given a rough partition of the display space, we are able to extract gaze ethograms that allow discrimination of three common user behavioral activities: reading a text, viewing a video clip, and writing a text. A gaze tracking system is used to build the gaze ethogram. User behavioral activity is modeled by a classifier of gaze ethograms able to recognize the user activity after training. Conventional commercial gaze tracking for research in the neurosciences and psychology science are expensive and intrusive, sometimes impose wearing uncomfortable appliances. For the purposes of our behavioral research, we have developed an open source gaze tracking system that runs on conventional laptop computers using their low quality cameras. Some of the gaze tracking pipeline elements have been borrowed from the open source community. However, we have developed innovative solutions to some of the key issues that arise in the gaze tracker. Specifically, we have proposed texture-based eye features that are quite robust to low quality images. These features are the input for a classifier predicting the screen target area, the user is looking at. We report comparative results of several classifier architectures carried out in order to select the classifier to be used to extract the gaze ethograms for our behavioral research. We perform another classifier selection at the level of ethogram classification. Finally, we report encouraging results of user behavioral activity recognition experiments carried out over an inhouse dataset.