Automated Visual Attention Detection using Mobile Eye Tracking in Behavioral Classroom Studies
This addresses the need for non-intrusive, automated analysis of teacher visual attention to improve instructional strategies and teacher training, though it is incremental as it builds on existing face recognition and eye tracking methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically detecting which students teachers focus on in classrooms using mobile eye tracking, presenting a pipeline that combines face detection and recognition with gaze data, achieving accuracies of about 0.7 in U-shaped and 0.9 in small classrooms.
Teachers' visual attention and its distribution across the students in classrooms can constitute important implications for student engagement, achievement, and professional teacher training. Despite that, inferring the information about where and which student teachers focus on is not trivial. Mobile eye tracking can provide vital help to solve this issue; however, the use of mobile eye tracking alone requires a significant amount of manual annotations. To address this limitation, we present an automated processing pipeline concept that requires minimal manually annotated data to recognize which student the teachers focus on. To this end, we utilize state-of-the-art face detection models and face recognition feature embeddings to train face recognition models with transfer learning in the classroom context and combine these models with the teachers' gaze from mobile eye trackers. We evaluated our approach with data collected from four different classrooms, and our results show that while it is possible to estimate the visually focused students with reasonable performance in all of our classroom setups, U-shaped and small classrooms led to the best results with accuracies of approximately 0.7 and 0.9, respectively. While we did not evaluate our method for teacher-student interactions and focused on the validity of the technical approach, as our methodology does not require a vast amount of manually annotated data and offers a non-intrusive way of handling teachers' visual attention, it could help improve instructional strategies, enhance classroom management, and provide feedback for professional teacher development.