Visual Data Cleansing of Low-Level Eye-Tracking Data

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A time-varying view on eye movement data

Analysis and visualization of eye movement data from eye tracking studies typically take into account gazes, fixations, and saccades of both eyes filtered and fused into a combined eye. Although this is a valid strategy, we argue that it is also worth investigating low-level eye tracking data prior to high-level analysis, because today’s eye tracking systems measure and infer data from both eyes separately. In this work, we present an approach that supports visual analysis and cleansing of low-level time-varying data for eye tracking experiments. The visualization helps researchers get insights into the quality of the data in terms of its uncertainty, or reliability. We discuss uncertainty originating from eye tracking, and how to reveal it for visualization, using a comparative approach for disagreement between plots, and a density-based approach for accuracy in volume rendering. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by applying it to eye movement data recorded with two state-of-the-art eye trackers.