Pradipta Biswas

Murthy L. R. D., Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Shambhavi Aggarwal et al.

Appearance-based gaze estimation systems have shown great progress recently, yet the performance of these techniques depend on the datasets used for training. Most of the existing gaze estimation datasets setup in interactive settings were recorded in laboratory conditions and those recorded in the wild conditions display limited head pose and illumination variations. Further, we observed little attention so far towards precision evaluations of existing gaze estimation approaches. In this work, we present a large gaze estimation dataset, PARKS-Gaze, with wider head pose and illumination variation and with multiple samples for a single Point of Gaze (PoG). The dataset contains 974 minutes of data from 28 participants with a head pose range of 60 degrees in both yaw and pitch directions. Our within-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations and precision evaluations indicate that the proposed dataset is more challenging and enable models to generalize on unseen participants better than the existing in-the-wild datasets. The project page can be accessed here: https://github.com/lrdmurthy/PARKS-Gaze

Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Agarwal, Patrick Dylan Zwick et al.

With the increasing prevalence of video recordings there is a growing need for tools that can maintain the privacy of those recorded. In this paper, we define an approach for redacting personally identifiable text from videos using a combination of optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We examine the relative performance of this approach when used with different OCR models, specifically Tesseract and the OCR system from Google Cloud Vision (GCV). For the proposed approach the performance of GCV, in both accuracy and speed, is significantly higher than Tesseract. Finally, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of both models in real-world applications.

Pradipta Biswas, Himanshu Vishwakarma, Mukund Mitra et al.

Human Space Flight missions often require interaction with touchscreen displays. This paper presents a study of investigating human machine interaction with touchscreen using both finger and stylus in the International Space Station. The study also reports cognitive state of astronauts in the form of spatial 2-back test and mental well-being through self-reported scales. We presented a series of results comparing pointing and selection performance among ISS crews, ground crews and university students, finger-based touching and stylus-based touching in microgravity and mental well-being scores. We reported that finger-based pointing is statistically significantly faster than stylus-based pointing in microgravity based on analysis of 420 pointing tasks in ISS from 2 astronauts. We also did not find any significant difference among pointing performance and mental state of astronauts and students on ground. Results from the study can be used to predict pointing and selection time from dimension and position of GUI (Graphical User Interface) elements for cockpits of spacecraft.

Priyam Rajkhowa, Pradipta Biswas

Privacy is important for all individuals in everyday life. With emerging technologies, smartphones with AR, various social networking applications and artificial intelligence driven modes of surveillance, they tend to intrude privacy. This study aimed to explore and discover various concerns related to perception of privacy in this era of ubiquitous technologies. It employed online survey questionnaire to study user perspectives of privacy. Purposive sampling was used to collect data from 60 participants. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze data. Our study discovered key themes like attitude towards privacy in public and private spaces, privacy awareness, consent seeking, dilemmas/confusions related to various technologies, impact of attitude and beliefs on individuals actions regarding how to protect oneself from invasion of privacy in both public and private spaces. These themes interacted amongst themselves and influenced formation of various actions. They were like core principles that molded actions that prevented invasion of privacy for both participant and bystander. Findings of this study would be helpful to improve privacy and personalization of various emerging technologies. This study contributes to privacy by design and positive design by considering psychological needs of users. This is suggestive that the findings can be applied in the areas of experience design, positive technologies, social computing and behavioral interventions.

Gowdham Prabhakar, Priyam Rajkhowa, Pradipta Biswas

In automotive domain, operation of secondary tasks like accessing infotainment system, adjusting air conditioning vents, and side mirrors distract drivers from driving. Though existing modalities like gesture and speech recognition systems facilitate undertaking secondary tasks by reducing duration of eyes off the road, those often require remembering a set of gestures or screen sequences. In this paper, we have proposed two different modalities for drivers to virtually touch the dashboard display using a laser tracker with a mechanical switch and an eye gaze switch. We compared performances of our proposed modalities against conventional touch modality in automotive environment by comparing pointing and selection times of representative secondary task and also analysed effect on driving performance in terms of deviation from lane, average speed, variation in perceived workload and system usability. We did not find significant difference in driving and pointing performance between laser tracking system and existing touchscreen system. Our result also showed that the driving and pointing performance of the virtual touch system with eye gaze switch was significantly better than the same with mechanical switch. We evaluated the efficacy of the proposed virtual touch system with eye gaze switch inside a real car and investigated acceptance of the system by professional drivers using qualitative research. The quantitative and qualitative studies indicated importance of using multimodal system inside car and highlighted several criteria for acceptance of new automotive user interface.

Archana Hebbar, Abhay Pashilkar, Pradipta Biswas

This paper investigates applications of eye tracking in transport aircraft design evaluations. Piloted simulations were conducted for a complete flight profile including take off, cruise and landing flight scenario using the transport aircraft flight simulator at CSIR National Aerospace Laboratories. Thirty-one simulation experiments were carried out with three pilots and engineers while recording the ocular parameters and the flight data. Simulations were repeated for high workload conditions like flying with degraded visibility and during stall. Pilots visual scan behaviour and workload levels were analysed using ocular parameters; while comparing with the statistical deviations from the desired flight path. Conditions for fatigue were also recreated through long duration simulations and signatures for the same from the ocular parameters were assessed. Results from the study found correlation between the statistical inferences obtained from the ocular parameters with those obtained from the flight path deviations. The paper also demonstrates an evaluators console that assists the designers or evaluators for better understanding of pilots attentional resource allocation.

Gowdham Prabhakar, Pradipta Biswas

Automotive User Interface (AutoUI) is relatively a new discipline in the context of both Transportation Engineering and Human Machine Interaction (HMI). It covers various HMI aspects both inside and outside vehicle ranging from operating the vehicle itself, undertaking various secondary tasks, driver behaviour analysis, cognitive load estimation and so on. This review paper discusses various interactive HMI inside a vehicle used for undertaking secondary tasks. We divided recent HMIs through four sections on virtual touch interfaces, wearable devices, speech recognition and non-visual interfaces and eye gaze controlled systems. Finally, we summarized advantages and disadvantages of various technologies.

Pradipta Biswas, Pilar Orero, Manohar Swaminathan et al.

Augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies offer new ways of interacting with digital media. However, such technologies are not well explored for people with different ranges of abilities beyond a few specific navigation and gaming applications. While new standardization activities are investigating accessibility issues with existing AR/VR systems, commercial systems are still confined to specialized hardware and software limiting their widespread adoption among people with disabilities as well as seniors. This proposal takes a novel approach by exploring the application of user model-based personalization for AR/VR systems to improve accessibility. The workshop will be organized by experienced researchers in the field of human computer interaction, robotics control, assistive technology, and AR/VR systems, and will consist of peer reviewed papers and hands-on demonstrations. Keynote speeches and demonstrations will cover latest accessibility research at Microsoft, Google, Verizon and leading universities.

Somnath Arjun, KamalPreet Singh Saluja, Pradipta Biswas

This paper proposes a set of techniques to investigate eye gaze and fixation patterns while users interact with electronic user interfaces. In particular, two case studies are presented - one on analysing eye gaze while interacting with deceptive materials in web pages and another on analysing graphs in standard computer monitor and virtual reality displays. We analysed spatial and temporal distributions of eye gaze fixations and sequence of eye gaze movements. We used this information to propose new design guidelines to avoid deceptive materials in web and user-friendly representation of data in 2D graphs. In 2D graph study we identified that area graph has lowest number of clusters for user's gaze fixations and lowest average response time. The results of 2D graph study were implemented in virtual and mixed reality environment. Along with this, it was ob-served that the duration while interacting with deceptive materials in web pages is independent of the number of fixations. Furthermore, web-based data visualization tool for analysing eye tracking data from single and multiple users was developed.

Antony William Joseph, Jeevitha Shree DV, Kamal Preet Singh Saluja et al.

Usage of smartphones and tablets have been increasing rapidly with multi-touch interaction and powerful configurations. Performing tasks on mobile phones become more complex as people age, thereby increasing their cognitive workload. In this context, we conducted an eye tracking study with 50 participants between the age of 20 to 60 years and above, living in Bangalore, India. This paper focuses on visual nature of interaction with mobile user interfaces. The study aims to investigate how aging affects user experience on mobile phones while performing complex tasks, and estimate cognitive workload using eye tracking metrics. The study consisted of five tasks that were performed on an android mobile phone under naturalistic scenarios using eye tracking glasses. We recorded ocular parameters like fixation rate, saccadic rate, average fixation duration, maximum fixation duration and standard deviation of pupil dilation for left and right eyes respectively for each participant. Results from our study show that aging has a bigger effect on performance of using mobile phones irrespective of any complex task given to them. We noted that, participants aged between 50 to 60+ years had difficulties in completing tasks and showed increased cognitive workload. They took longer fixation duration to complete tasks which involved copy-paste operations. Further, we identifed design implications and provided design recommendations for designers and manufacturers.

Shashank Kumar, JeevithaShree DV, Pradipta Biswas

There is plethora of tools available for automatic evaluation of web accessibility with respect to WCAG. This paper compares a set of WCAG tools and their results in terms of ease of comprehension and implementation by web developers. The paper highlights accessibility issues that cannot be captured only through conformance to WCAG tools and propose additional methods to evaluate accessibility through an Inclusive User Model. We initially selected ten WCAG tools from W3 website and used a set of these tools on the landing pages of BBC and WHO websites. We compared their outcome in terms of commonality, differences, amount of details and usability. Finally, we briefly introduced the Inclusive User Model and demonstrated how simulation of user interaction can capture usability and accessibility issues that are not detected through WCAG analysis. The paper concludes with a proposal on a Common User Profile format that can be used to compare and contrast accessibility systems and services, and to simulate and personalize interaction for users with different range of abilities.

Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Imon Mukherjee, Pradipta Biswas

This paper investigates how working of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can be explained through visualization in the context of machine perception of autonomous vehicles. We visualize what type of features are extracted in different convolution layers of CNN that helps to understand how CNN gradually increases spatial information in every layer. Thus, it concentrates on region of interests in every transformation. Visualizing heat map of activation helps us to understand how CNN classifies and localizes different objects in image. This study also helps us to reason behind low accuracy of a model helps to increase trust on object detection module.

LRD Murthy, Abhishek Mukhopadhyay, Varshit Yellheti et al.

Eye gaze controlled interfaces allow us to directly manipulate a graphical user interface just by looking at it. This technology has great potential in military aviation, in particular, operating different displays in situations where pilots hands are occupied with flying the aircraft. This paper reports studies on analyzing accuracy of eye gaze controlled interface inside aircraft undertaking representative flying missions. We reported that pilots can undertake representative pointing and selection tasks at less than 2 secs on average. Further, we evaluated the accuracy of eye gaze tracking glass under various G-conditions and analyzed its failure modes. We observed that the accuracy of an eye tracker is less than 5 degree of visual angle up to +3G, although it is less accurate at minus 1G and plus 5G. We observed that eye tracker may fail to track under higher external illumination. We also infer that an eye tracker to be used in military aviation need to have larger vertical field of view than the present available systems. We used this analysis to develop eye gaze trackers for Multi-Functional displays and Head Mounted Display System. We obtained significant reduction in pointing and selection times using our proposed HMDS system compared to traditional TDS.

Vinay Krishna Sharma, L. R. D. Murthy, KamalPreet Singh Saluja et al.

Background: People with severe speech and motor impairment (SSMI) often uses a technique called eye pointing to communicate with outside world. One of their parents, caretakers or teachers hold a printed board in front of them and by analyzing their eye gaze manually, their intentions are interpreted. This technique is often error prone and time consuming and depends on a single caretaker. Objective: We aimed to automate the eye tracking process electronically by using commercially available tablet, computer or laptop and without requiring any dedicated hardware for eye gaze tracking. The eye gaze tracker is used to develop a video see through based AR (augmented reality) display that controls a robotic device with eye gaze and deployed for a fabric printing task. Methodology: We undertook a user centred design process and separately evaluated the web cam based gaze tracker and the video see through based human robot interaction involving users with SSMI. We also reported a user study on manipulating a robotic arm with webcam based eye gaze tracker. Results: Using our bespoke eye gaze controlled interface, able bodied users can select one of nine regions of screen at a median of less than 2 secs and users with SSMI can do so at a median of 4 secs. Using the eye gaze controlled human-robot AR display, users with SSMI could undertake representative pick and drop task at an average duration less than 15 secs and reach a randomly designated target within 60 secs using a COTS eye tracker and at an average time of 2 mins using the webcam based eye gaze tracker.

LRD Murthy, Somnath Arjun, Kamalpreet Singh Saluja et al.

This paper presents development of a smart sensor dashboard for Industry 4.0 encompassing both 2D and 3D visualization modules. In 2D module, we described physical connections among sensors and visualization modules and rendering data on 2D screen. A user study was presented where participants answered a few questions using four types of graphs. We analyzed eye gaze patterns in screen, number of correct answers and response time for all the four graphs. For 3D module, we developed a VR digital twin for sensor data visualization. A user study was presented evaluating the effect of different feedback scenarios on quantitative and qualitative metrics of interaction in the virtual environment. We compared visual and haptic feedback and a multimodal combination of both visual and haptic feedback for VR environment. We found that haptic feedback significantly improved quantitative metrics of interaction than a no feedback case whereas a multimodal feedback is significantly improved qualitative metrics of the interaction.