Towards fine-grained fixation analysis: distilling out context dependence

In this paper, we explore the problem of analyzing gaze patterns towards attributing greater meaning to observed fixations. In recent years, there have been a number of efforts that attempt to categorize fixations according to their properties. Given that there are a multitude of factors that may contribute to fixational behavior, including both bottom-up and top-down influences on neural mechanisms for visual representation and saccadic control, efforts to better understand factors that may contribute to any given fixation may play an important role in augmenting raw fixation data. A grand objective of this line of thinking is in explaining the reason for any observed fixation as a combination of various latent factors. In the current work, we do not seek to solve this problem in general, but rather to factor out the role of the holistic structure of a scene as one observable, and quantifiable factor that plays a role in determining fixational behavior. Statistical methods and approximations to achieve this are presented, and supported by experimental results demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed methods.