Vision-Based Global Localization of Points of Gaze in Sport Climbing

Abstract

Investigating realistic visual exploration is quite challenging in sport climbing, but it promises a deeper understanding of how performers adjust their perception-action couplings during task completion. However, the samples of participants and the number of trials analyzed in such experiments are often reduced to a minimum because of the time-consuming treatments of the eye-tracking data. Notably, mapping successive points of gaze from local views to the global scene is generally performed manually by watching eye-tracking video data frame by frame. This manual procedure is not suitable for processing a large number of datasets. Consequently, this study developed an automatic method for solving this global point of gaze localization in indoor sport climbing. Particularly, an eye-tracking device was used for acquiring local image frames and points of gaze from a climber’s local views. Artificial landmarks, designed as four-color-disk groups, were distributed on the wall to facilitate localization. Global points of gaze were computed based on planar homography transforms between the local and global positions of the detected landmarks. Thirty climbing trials were recorded and processed by the proposed methods. The success rates (Mean[Formula: see text]±[Formula: see text]SD) were up to 85.72%[Formula: see text]±[Formula: see text]13.90%, and the errors (Mean[Formula: see text]±[Formula: see text]SD) were up to [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m. The proposed method will be employed for computing global points of gaze in our current climbing dataset for understanding the dynamics intertwining of gaze and motor behaviors during the climbs.