Monitoring Human Visual Behavior during the Observation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Videos

The present article describes an experimental study towards the examination of human visual behavior during the observation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) videos. Experimental performance is based on the collection and the quantitative & qualitative analysis of eye tracking data. The results highlight that UAV flight altitude serves as a dominant specification that affects the visual attention process, while the presence of sky in the video background seems to be the less affecting factor in this procedure. Additionally, the main surrounding environment, the main size of the observed object as well as the main perceived angle between UAV’s flight plain and ground appear to have an equivalent influence in observers’ visual reaction during the exploration of such stimuli. Moreover, the provided heatmap visualizations indicate the most salient locations in the used UAVs videos. All produced data (raw gaze data, fixation and saccade events, and heatmap visualizations) are freely distributed to the scientific community as a new dataset (EyeTrackUAV) that can be served as an objective ground truth in future studies