EyeTrackUAV2: A Large-Scale Binocular Eye-Tracking Dataset for UAV Videos

Abstract

The fast and tremendous evolution of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery gives place to the multiplication of applications in various fields such as military and civilian surveillance, delivery services, and wildlife monitoring. Combining UAV imagery with study of dynamic salience further extends the number of future applications. Indeed, considerations of visual attention open the door to new avenues in a number of scientific fields such as compression, retargeting, and decision-making tools. To conduct saliency studies, we identified the need for new large-scale eye-tracking datasets for visual salience in UAV content. Therefore, we address this need by introducing the dataset EyeTrackUAV2. It consists of the collection of precise binocular gaze information (1000 Hz) over 43 videos (RGB, 30 fps, 1280 × 720 or 720 × 480). Thirty participants observed stimuli under both free viewing and task conditions. Fixations and saccades were then computed with the dispersion-threshold identification (I-DT) algorithm, while gaze density maps were calculated by filtering eye positions with a Gaussian kernel. An analysis of collected gaze positions provides recommendations for visual salience ground-truth generation. It also sheds light upon variations of saliency biases in UAV videos when opposed to conventional content, especially regarding the center bias.