EG-SNIK: A Free Viewing Egocentric Gaze Dataset and Its Applications

Egocentric vision data captures the first person perspective of a visual stimulus and helps study the gaze behavior in more natural contexts. In this work, we propose a new dataset collected in a free viewing style with an end-to-end data processing pipeline. A group of 25 participants provided their gaze information wearing Tobii Pro Glasses 2 set up at a museum. The gaze stream is post-processed for handling missing or incoherent information. The corresponding video stream is clipped into 20 videos corresponding to 20 museum exhibits and compensated for user’s unwanted head movements. Based on the velocity of directional shifts of the eye, the I-VT algorithm classifies the eye movements into either fixations or saccades. Representative scanpaths are built by generalizing multiple viewers’ gazing styles for all exhibits. Therefore, it is a dataset with both the individual gazing styles of many viewers and the generic trend followed by all of them towards a museum exhibit. The application of our dataset is demonstrated for characterizing the inherent gaze dynamics using state trajectory estimator based on ancestor sampling (STEAS) model in solving gaze data classification and retrieval problems. This dataset can also be used for addressing problems like segmentation, summarization using both conventional machine and deep learning approaches.