Abstract
This paper uses quantitative eye tracking indicators to analyze the relationship between images of paintings and human viewing. First, we build the eye tracking fixation sequences through areas of interest (AOIs) into an information channel, the gaze channel. Although this channel can be interpreted as a generalization of a first-order Markov chain, we show that the gaze channel is fully independent of this interpretation, and stands even when first-order Markov chain modeling would no longer fit. The entropy of the equilibrium distribution and the conditional entropy of a Markov chain are extended with additional information-theoretic measures, such as joint entropy, mutual information, and conditional entropy of each area of interest. Then, the gaze information channel is applied to analyze a subset of Van Gogh paintings. Van Gogh artworks, classified by art critics into several periods, have been studied under computational aesthetics measures, which include the use of Kolmogorov complexity and permutation entropy. The gaze information channel paradigm allows the information-theoretic measures to analyze both individual gaze behavior and clustered behavior from observers and paintings. Finally, we show that there is a clear correlation between the gaze information channel quantities that come from direct human observation, and the computational aesthetics measures that do not rely on any human observation at all.
Highlights
The eye is one of the most important organ for human beings to know the external things and transmit information
As a first-order Markov chain can be interpreted as an information channel, we proposed for the first time the gaze information channel in [33], and applied it to study the artwork of Van Gogh
After modeling the individuals’ gaze as Markov chains, Krejtz et al [36,37] calculated the entropy of the stationary distribution Hs and the transition or conditional entropy Ht to interpret the overall distribution of attention over areas of interest (AOIs), as the Markov chain transition probability matrix has a dual interpretation as a conditional probability matrix
Summary
The eye is one of the most important organ for human beings to know the external things and transmit information. The heat map represents the eye movement data as a Gaussian mixture model, but because this method loses the sequence information of the fixations, the index based on the heat map can only reflect the similarity of different regions of the observed image, and ignores the order of fixation. Quantitative analysis based on transition matrix, of which gaze entropy (the entropy of the Markov chain) is one of the most important measures, has been used in recent years.
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