Task dependence of visual attention on compressed videos: point of gaze statistics and analysis

We tracked the points-of-gaze of human observers as they viewed videos drawn from foreign films while engaged in two different tasks: (1) Quality Assessment and (2) Summarization. Each video was subjected to three possible distortion severities – no compression (pristine), low compression and high compression – using the H.264 compression standard. We have analyzed these eye-movement locations in detail. We extracted local statistical features around points-of-gaze and used them to answer the following questions: (1) Are there statistical differences in variances of points-of-gaze across videos between the two tasks?, (2) Does the variance in eye movements indicate a change in viewing strategy with change in distortion severity? (3) Are statistics at points-of-gaze different from those at random locations? (4) How do local low-level statistics vary across tasks? (5) How do point-of-gaze statistics vary across distortion severities within each task?