X-Eye: A reference format for eye tracking data to facilitate analyses across databases

Datasets of images annotated with eye tracking data constitute important ground truth for the development of saliency models, which have applications in many areas of electronic imaging. While comparisons and reviews of saliency models abound, similar comparisons among the eye tracking databases themselves are rare. In an earlier paper, we reviewed the content and purpose of over two dozen databases available in the public domain and discussed their commonalities and differences. A major issue is that the formats of the various datasets vary a lot owing to the nature of tools used for eye movement recordings, and often specialized code is required to use the data for further analysis. In this paper, we therefore propose a common reference format for eye tracking data, together with conversion routines for 16 existing image eye tracking databases to that format. Furthermore, we conduct a few analyses on these datasets as examples of what X-Eye facilitates.