Robust Recognition of Reading Activity in Transit Using Wearable Electrooculography

  • Authors:
  • Andreas Bulling;Jamie A. Ward;Hans Gellersen;Gerhard Tröster

  • Affiliations:
  • Wearable Computing Laboratory, ETH Zurich,;Embedded Interactive Systems Group, Lancaster University,;Embedded Interactive Systems Group, Lancaster University,;Wearable Computing Laboratory, ETH Zurich,

  • Venue:
  • Pervasive '08 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this work we analyse the eye movements of people in transit in an everyday environment using a wearable electrooculographic (EOG) system. We compare three approaches for continuous recognition of reading activities: a string matching algorithm which exploits typical characteristics of reading signals, such as saccades and fixations; and two variants of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) - mixed Gaussian and discrete. The recognition algorithms are evaluated in an experiment performed with eight subjects reading freely chosen text without pictures while sitting at a desk, standing, walking indoors and outdoors, and riding a tram. A total dataset of roughly 6 hours was collected with reading activity accounting for about half of the time. We were able to detect reading activities over all subjects with a top recognition rate of 80.2% (71.0% recall, 11.6% false positives) using string matching. We show that EOG is a potentially robust technique for reading recognition across a number of typical daily situations.