Target Features Affect Visual Search, A Study of Eye Fixations

TL;DR

This study analyzes how target size and eccentricity influence human visual search performance, revealing that larger and more eccentric targets are found faster with fewer fixations, based on analysis of the COCO-Search18 dataset.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of factors affecting human visual search efficiency using a large dataset, highlighting the impact of target size and eccentricity.

Findings

Larger targets are found faster.

More eccentric targets are located more quickly.

Fewer fixations are needed for larger, eccentric targets.

Abstract

Visual Search is referred to the task of finding a target object among a set of distracting objects in a visual display. In this paper, based on an independent analysis of the COCO-Search18 dataset, we investigate how the performance of human participants during visual search is affected by different parameters such as the size and eccentricity of the target object. We also study the correlation between the error rate of participants and search performance. Our studies show that a bigger and more eccentric target is found faster with fewer number of fixations. Our code for the graphics are publicly available at https://github.com/ManooshSamiei/COCOSearch18_Analysis.