Multi-line Adaptive Perimetry (MAP): A New Procedure for Quantifying Visual Field Integrity for Rapid Assessment of Macular Diseases.

PurposeIn order to monitor visual defects associated with macular degeneration (MD), we present a new psychophysical assessment called multiline adaptive perimetry (MAP) that measures visual field integrity by simultaneously estimating regions associated with perceptual distortions (metamorphopsia) and visual sensitivity loss (scotoma).MethodsWe first ran simulations of MAP with a computerized model of a human observer to determine optimal test design characteristics. In experiment 1, predictions of the model were assessed by simulating metamorphopsia with an eye-tracking device with 20 healthy vision participants. In experiment 2, eight patients (16 eyes) with macular disease completed two MAP assessments separated by about 12 weeks, while a subset (10 eyes) also completed repeated Macular Integrity Assessment (MAIA) microperimetry and Amsler grid exams.ResultsResults revealed strong repeatability of MAP and high accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity (0.89, 0.81, and 0.90, respectively) in classifying patient eyes with severe visual impairment. We also found a significant relationship in terms of the spatial patterns of performance across visual field loci derived from MAP and MAIA microperimetry. However, there was a lack of correspondence between MAP and subjective Amsler grid reports in isolating perceptually distorted regions.ConclusionsThese results highlight the validity and efficacy of MAP in producing quantitative maps of visual field disturbances, including simultaneous mapping of metamorphopsia and sensitivity impairment.Translational relevanceFuture work will be needed to assess applicability of this examination for potential early detection of MD symptoms and/or portable assessment on a home device or computer

Task-relevant spatialized auditory cues enhance attention orientation and peripheral target detection in natural scenes

Concurrent auditory stimuli have been shown to enhance detection of abstract visual targets in experimental setups with little ecological validity. We presented 11 participants, wearing an eye-tracking device, with a visual detection task in an immersive audiovisual environment replicating a real-world environment. The participants were to fixate on a visual target and to press a key when they were confident of having detected the target. The visual world was accompanied by a task-relevant or task-irrelevant spatialized sound scene with different onset asynchronies. Our findings indicate task-relevant auditory cues to aid in orienting to and detecting a peripheral but not central visual target. The enhancement is amplified with an increasing amount of audio lead

Semi-supervised learning with the clustering and Decision Trees classifier for the task of cognitive workload study

The paper is focused on application of the clustering algorithm and Decision Tress classifier (DTs) as a semi-supervised method for the task of cognitive workload level classification. The analyzed data were collected during examination of Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST) with use of eye-tracker device. 26 participants took part in examination as volunteers. There were conducted three parts of DSST test with different levels of difficulty. As a results there were obtained three versions of data: low, middle and high level of cognitive workload. The case study covered clustering of collected data by using k-means algorithm to detect three clusters or more. The obtained clusters were evaluated by three internal indices to measure the quality of clustering. The David-Boudin index detected the best results in case of four clusters. Based on this information it is possible to formulate the hypothesis of the existence of four clusters. The obtained clusters were adopted as classes in supervised learning and have been subjected to classification. The DTs was applied in classification. There were obtained the 0.85 mean accuracy for three-class classification and 0.73 mean accuracy for four-class classification. &nbsp

End-to-End Eye Movement Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Common computational methods for automated eye movement detection - i.e. the task of detecting different types of eye movement in a continuous stream of gaze data - are limited in that they either involve thresholding on hand-crafted signal features, require individual detectors each only detecting a single movement, or require pre-segmented data. We propose a novel approach for eye movement detection that only involves learning a single detector end-to-end, i.e. directly from the continuous gaze data stream and simultaneously for different eye movements without any manual feature crafting or segmentation. Our method is based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) that recently demonstrated superior performance in a variety of tasks in computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning. We further introduce a novel multi-participant dataset that contains scripted and free-viewing sequences of ground-truth annotated saccades, fixations, and smooth pursuits. We show that our CNN-based method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin on this challenging dataset, thereby underlining the significant potential of this approach for holistic, robust, and accurate eye movement protocol analysis

Tool for the Analysis of Human Interaction with Two-Dimensional Printed Imagery

The study of human vision can include our interaction with objects. These studies include behavior modeling, understanding visual attention and motor guidance, and enhancing user experiences. But all these studies have one thing in common. To analyze the data in detail, researchers typically have to analyze video data frame by frame. Real world interaction data often comprises of data from both eye and hand. Analyzing such data frame by frame can get very tedious and time-consuming. A calibrated scene video from an eye-tracker captured at 120 Hz for 3 minutes has over 21,000 frames to be analyzed. Automating the process is crucial to allow interaction research to proceed. Research in object recognition over the last decade now allows eye-movement data to be analyzed automatically to determine what a subject is looking at and for how long. I will describe my research in which I developed a pipeline to help researchers analyze interaction data including eye and hand. Inspired by a semi-automated pipeline for analyzing eye tracking data, I have created a pipeline for analyzing hand grasp along with gaze. Putting both pipelines together can help researchers analyze interaction data. The hand-grasp pipeline detects skin to locate the hands, then determines what object (if any) the hand is over, and where the thumbs/fingers occluded that object. I also compare identification with recognition throughout the pipeline. The current pipeline operates on independent frames; future work will extend the pipeline to take advantage of the dynamics of natural interactions