Gaze self-similarity plots as a useful tool for eye movement characteristics analysis

Eye tracking becomes more and more important way to analyze human behavior. However, a proper analysis of data obtained from an eye tracker occurs to be a challenging task. Traditional visualization techniques like scanpaths or heat maps may reveal interesting information, however much of useful information is still not visible, especially when the temporal characteristics of eye movement is taken into account. This paper introduces a technique called gaze self-similarity plot (GSSP) that may be applied to visualize both spatial and temporal eye movement features on one two dimensional plot. The technique is an extension of the idea of recurrence plots, commonly used in time series analysis. The paper introduces the basic concepts of the proposed approach complemented with some examples explaining what kind of information may be revealed and areas of the GSSP applications.