Ferns for area of interest free scanpath classification

Scanpath classification can offer insight into the visual strategies of groups such as experts and novices. We propose to use random ferns in combination with saccade angle successions to compare scanpaths. One advantage of our method is that it does not require areas of interest to be computed or annotated. The conditional distribution in random ferns additionally allows for learning angle successions, which do not have to be entirely present in a scanpath. We evaluated our approach on two publicly available datasets and improved the classification accuracy by ≈ 10 and ≈ 20 percent.