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Free keywords:
Computer Science, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, cs.CV,Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, cs.HC
Abstract:
What does human gaze reveal about a users' intents and to which extend can
these intents be inferred or even visualized? Gaze was proposed as an implicit
source of information to predict the target of visual search and, more
recently, to predict the object class and attributes of the search target. In
this work, we go one step further and investigate the feasibility of combining
recent advances in encoding human gaze information using deep convolutional
neural networks with the power of generative image models to visually decode,
i.e. create a visual representation of, the search target. Such visual decoding
is challenging for two reasons: 1) the search target only resides in the user's
mind as a subjective visual pattern, and can most often not even be described
verbally by the person, and 2) it is, as of yet, unclear if gaze fixations
contain sufficient information for this task at all. We show, for the first
time, that visual representations of search targets can indeed be decoded only
from human gaze fixations. We propose to first encode fixations into a semantic
representation and then decode this representation into an image. We evaluate
our method on a recent gaze dataset of 14 participants searching for clothing
in image collages and validate the model's predictions using two human studies.
Our results show that 62% (Chance level = 10%) of the time users were able to
select the categories of the decoded image right. In our second studies we show
the importance of a local gaze encoding for decoding visual search targets of
user