title: Object Category Understanding via Eye Fixations on Freehand Sketches.
abstract: The study of eye gaze fixations on photographic images is an active research area. In contrast, the image sub-category of freehand sketches has not received as much attention for such studies. In this paper, we analyze the results of a free-viewing gaze fixation study conducted on 3904 freehand sketches distributed across 160 object categories. Our analysis shows that fixation sequences exhibit marked consistency within a sketch, across sketches of a category and even across suitably grouped sets of categories. This multi-level consistency is remarkable given the variability in depiction and extreme image content sparsity that characterizes hand-drawn object sketches. In this paper, we show that the multi-level consistency in the fixation data can be exploited to 1) predict a test sketch's category given only its fixation sequence and 2) build a computational model which predicts part-labels underlying fixations on objects. We hope that our findings motivate the community to deem sketch-like representations worthy of gaze-based studies vis-a-vis photographic images.
authors.forename: Ravi Kiran
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Sarvadevabhatla
authors.forename: Sudharshan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suresh
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Venkatesh Babu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult