Gaze Control Factors for Natural Human Robot Interaction from Scanpath Comparisons

Human-like gaze control of robots is essential for natural human robot interaction (HRI), and thus it is necessary to identify the gaze control factors that affect human gaze. In this paper, the gaze control factors are derived inductively from the observation of human scanpaths. Human scanpaths are measured from movie clips and are transformed into vector-based representation that contains spatio-temporal information. The transformed scanpaths are compared to find the most common scanpath. The selected scanpath is analyzed to identify the gaze control factors. The derived factors are anticipation, knowledge, and attractions in a static image such as salient regions, humans, objects, and center of visual inputs.