iCatcher: A neural network approach for automated coding of young children's eye movements.

Publication Year
2022

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

Infants' looking behaviors are often used for measuring attention, real-time processing, and learning-often using low-resolution videos. Despite the ubiquity of gaze-related methods in developmental science, current analysis techniques usually involve laborious post hoc coding, imprecise real-time coding, or expensive eye trackers that may increase data loss and require a calibration phase. As an alternative, we propose using computer vision methods to perform automatic gaze estimation from low-resolution videos. At the core of our approach is a neural network that classifies gaze directions in real time. We compared our method, called iCatcher, to manually annotated videos from a prior study in which infants looked at one of two pictures on a screen. We demonstrated that the accuracy of iCatcher approximates that of human annotators and that it replicates the prior study's results. Our method is publicly available as an open-source repository at https://github.com/yoterel/iCatcher.

Journal
Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies
Volume
27
Issue
4
Pages
765-779
Date Published
12/2022
ISSN Number
1532-7078
Alternate Journal
Infancy
PMID
35416378