How Do People Look at Crowds? A Psychophysics Perspective.

Abstract

Crowds of people offer multitudes of stimuli for attracting gaze and attention. A crowded scene is considered to be formed with a small or a large number of objects or people standing together in a scene. What influences our attention in crowds can be different in static and dynamic conditions as the visual attention system of the humans is automatically directed to focus on the most pertinent stimuli in being presented in the scene. Many researches have concluded the preferences of people which viewing at the crowds more in the form of static images and a few in videos. We believe that the crowds are supposed to be dynamic and not static. Hence we constructed the dataset of real life crowd videos and transformed them into MTV-style video clips by combining the clippets together using jump cuts. We chose the participants with no specific knowledge and recorded their eye movements. It is usually accepted that every individuals attention is instantly influenced by the faces of the people. We are interested in exploring if this statement holds in conflation with crowd density (the number of people per square area). To this end, we would like to understand this relationship between human gaze and varying crowd densities using the fixation data from eye tracker recordings. The statistical fixation analysis will provide insights into the factors influencing gaze in varying levels of crowds.