Examining the effect of task on viewing behavior in videos using saliency maps

Research has shown that when viewing still images, people will look at these images in a different manner if instructed to evaluate their quality. They will tend to focus less on the main features of the image and, instead, scan the entire image area looking for clues for its level of quality. It is questionable, however, whether this finding can be extended to videos considering their dynamic nature. One can argue that when watching a video the viewer will always focus on the dynamically changing features of the video regardless of the given task. To test whether this is true, an experiment was conducted where half of the participants viewed videos with the task of quality evaluation while the other half were simply told to watch the videos as if they were watching a movie on TV or a video downloaded from the internet. The videos contained content which was degraded with compression artifacts over a wide range of quality. An eye tracking device was used to record the viewing behavior in both conditions. By comparing the behavior during each task, it was possible to observe a systematic difference in the viewing behavior which seemed to correlate to the quality of the videos.