2017 2nd International Conference on Communications, Information Management and Network Security (CIMNS 2017) ISBN: 978-1-60595-498-1
Study on Applications of Eye Tracking in Different Fields
Min KE
1,2,3, Bo-gang LIN
1,2,*and Yang YANG
1,21College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou Fujian 350108, China
2Key Lab of Information Security of Network System in Fujian Province, Fuzhou Fujian 350108,
China
3Institute for Web Science and Technologies, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, 56070,
Germany
*Corresponding author
Keywords: Eye tracking, Computer-Human interface, Information security, Gaze input, Web usability.
Abstract. The arising technology eye tracking has been blooming not only in the medical field but also in the field of computer science. There are various usages of eye tracking that range from human study, over usability of design, up to controller input of computer interfaces to information security. In this paper, the application of the real-time gaze-base technique eye tracking is introduced with the presented usages. A comprehensive summary shows the progress of this innovative technology. Finally, the challenges and potential directions of this uprising tool are being discussed.
Introduction
Eye contact conveys cognitive data and communicative information for social etiquette. The human eye can, in addition to its intended functionality, also be used to interact with computers. Eye tracking has been studied for decades. The range of eye tracking research widely varies from medical investigation, the human behavior, web usability analysis and the adaption of being a controller to applications.
Four main features of eye tracking are usually recorded for further analysis. Those features are fixation, saccades (shift between two location), pupil dilation (pupillary response) and blink rate [1,2]. Fixation is a long gaze duration within an area, usually between 200ms and 600ms. It’s commonly used for analyzing the user’s attentions in human behavior study and can be also regarded as a replacement of the mouse controller to select an object. Saccades represents the fast movement between two fixation points for relocation. It’s usually recorded as the users’ tracking path on the web sites in web design and as password-protection. Pupil dilation and blink rate, indicate the cognitive effort for tasks. They are used in physiologic experiments and game controlling.
This paper presents a collective survey of the application of eye tracking and aims to give readers a broad perception of eye tracking. Therefore, it is categorized into 4 aspects: human study, usability analysis, an input source and cyber security protection. This paper closes with a conclusion as well as a discussion of the challenges of eye tracking and proposes directions of future research.
Eye Tracking in Human Study
Eye tracking has been widely used in human study. For the commercial benefit, eye tracking is used to analyze the behavior and the decision process of customers.
Consumer Behavior
when customers make choices of products by the describing features of their preferences. The brains of customers were assessed by electroencephalogram (EEG) and the observing time was recorded by the eye tracker and calculated to get the average gaze time on 57 choice sets. The result of Rimi’s paper displays when participants get more and more familiar with choice sets, the average time across all participants decreases at a declining rate in terms of fixation time.
A comparable experiment [4] by Slanzi on predicting click intention of web users was conducted with eye tracking and EEG. It suggests the possibility of creating a classifier for the prediction based on the gaze position, pupil dilation and EEG responses.
Marina [5] studied the consumer perception of healthy fish food by different kinds of gaze fixation data, such as first fixation, fixation length and observation count. The heat-map principal component analysis demonstrates the fish burger to be the most attractive food based in its observation time. The observation time of the fish burger is longer than that of the fish fillet and fish nugget, though the order of healthiness of those three products is, from highest to lowest: fillet, burger, nugget. The author assumes that the fact might be this type of fish product was not familiar in Mexico, the participants showed their curiosity towards this product.
On the evaluation of popularity of videos, Lesser [6] provides the evidence that eye movement is able to infer the preference of audiences and diversity of opinions. Similar opinions are related to eye movement when similarity of gaze position is closely linked with population-level of preference.
Medical Investigation
Eye tracking helps people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to improve their quality of life. Emanuele [7] compared the information transfer rate, usability and cognitive workload of eye tracker and brain-computer interfaces for people with motor disability. The experiments show with comparison of brain-computer interfaces the eye tracker has a huge advantage regarding accuracy, speed and satisfaction.
Another study by Johannes [8] disclose the eye tracker to be valuable as a measurement to analyze cognitive processes in visual computing. A similar result [9] was concluded by user experiences of instant message (IM) applications integrating subjective questionnaires and objective eye tracking technologies. Furthermore, Höffler [10] validate the assumption of a three-dimensional cognitive style model, consisting of object imagery, spatial imagery and verbal dimensions, by using eye tracking.
Other thought-provoking focuses are the attentional effort [11] by Longman on switching tasks, perception and observation of landscapes [12] by Dupont and patient safety practice [13] by Henneman.
Eye Tracking in Usability Analysis
Eye tracking studies on usability have been applied to comprehend how visitors are browsing; e.g., in the context of the online bank login interface [14], map readability [15,16] and cognitive load of website complexity [17]. The interpretation of the eye tracking results on the web can be achieved through analyzing the visualized output results. Eye tracking provides analytical information about the user interaction between click events. Such information is shaped to deduce valuable knowledge concerning the significance of web elements, i.e., which elements are catching the user attention the most, which cause indecision and which elements are ignored. This knowledge is interpreted and then utilized as a modern strategy to investigate web usability. Ehmke [18] provided an approach to identify the web usability problems based on the data extracted from eye trackers.
cause less cognitive workload since participants spent more time on information searching than processing.
Gaze Controller
Eye tracking not only acts as a device for evaluation but also as an input source that helps building hands-free web interfaces. Many researchers put effort into the eye-user interface framework [20,21,22,23,24]. Eye tracker devices also contribute to a paint style program [25] by Kamp with voice command and other graphical software [26] by Gepner.
Eye-gaze is also a potential alternative to mouse control for people with motor control problems, as the speed of eye-gaze is fast to locate a target and it is non-encumbering. GazeTheWeb (GTW) [27], a gaze-controlled web browser, provides a solution to the problem of browsing the current web with eye-based interactions. It customized the interfaces to integrate eye gaze signals in the browser, overcoming the shortcomings of adapted web browsers [28]. Moreover, GTW integrates the visual appearance and control functionality of web pages in an eye tracking environment. It combines both web page element extraction and emulation of traditional input devices within the browser to provide smooth and reliable Web access. It uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which is used for web page rendering and interaction while supporting modern HTML standards. CEF communicates with another component called Visual Browser which manages the activities of the browser and the gaze-controlled interface with eye tracking. Another comparable gaze-controlled web browser is WeyeB [29], which has another mechanism of extracting the information from the “snapshot” of the watched area.
Information Security Protection
In some specific fields like security, eye tracking technology is applied for certain purposes. Web design is a key to prevent attacks including phishing attacks. Regarding the tracking of gaze, Darwish [30] found out that users, especially who have identified the phishing website, focus on the content of web pages rather than the obvious security indicator such as the domain names, digital certificates, SSL encryption. However, the domain name is a legitimacy indicator of website and the colors of the domain name can reduce the recognition time of phishing web pages. Miyamoto [31] proposes a browser extension EyeBit to enforce the habit of checking the address bar. EyeBit interacts with an eye tracker to exam whether the user looked at the domain name or not so that users can gradually develop a habit to check the bar.
Another field of research is password security. Cued Gaze-Points (CGP) [32] is a graphic password scheme that helps users to recall passwords by looking at images and selecting points in the right order. CGP is a shoulder-surfing resistant that stops others from watching the user entering the password. Bulling [33] adapted the idea mentioned above by saliency masks which cover out the areas where the users are most attracted to improve the security of graphical passwords. Consequently, these technologies display the possibility of combining eye tracking with cyber security.
Conclusions
During the evolution of eye tracking techniques, those techniques have been used in various scientific fields. The promising path of eye tracking directs to using eye trackers as input sources for application and game controlling. The gaze-controller is easy to zoom in/out, select an object and scroll over the display. There are some new analysis approaches of eye tracking [34,35] and application of game [36].
gesture and brain-computer interface can be considered when extending the framework for different modalities apart from gaze.
In further work of eye tracking, we aim to study multi-modalities and develop applications controlled by integration of eye tracking and other modalities.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported professor Bo-Gang LIN and Yang YANG by Key Lab of Information Security of Network System, Fuzhou University.
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