A novel gaze event detection metric that is not fooled by gaze-independent baselines

Abstract

Eye movement classification algorithms are typically evaluated either in isolation (in terms of absolute values of some performance statistic), or in comparison to previously introduced approaches. In contrast to this, we first introduce and thoroughly evaluate a set of both random and above-chance baselines that are completely independent of the eye tracking signal recorded for each considered individual observer. Surprisingly, our baselines often show performance that is either comparable to, or even exceeds the scores of some established eye movement classification approaches, for smooth pursuit detection in particular. In these cases, it may be that (i) algorithm performance is poor, (ii) the data set is overly simplistic with little inter-subject variability of the eye movements, or, alternatively, (iii) the currently used evaluation metrics are inappropriate. Based on these observations, we discuss the level of stimulus dependency of the eye movements in four different data sets. Finally, we propose a novel measure of agreement between true and assigned eye movement events, which, unlike existing metrics, is able to reveal the expected performance gap between the baselines and dedicated algorithms.