Variational Autoencoder for Image-Based Augmentation of Eye-Tracking Data

Mahmoud Elbattah, Colm Loughnane, Jean-Luc Guérin, Romuald Carette, Federica Cilia, Gilles Dequen
2021 Journal of Imaging  
Over the past decade, deep learning has achieved unprecedented successes in a diversity of application domains, given large-scale datasets. However, particular domains, such as healthcare, inherently suffer from data paucity and imbalance. Moreover, datasets could be largely inaccessible due to privacy concerns, or lack of data-sharing incentives. Such challenges have attached significance to the application of generative modeling and data augmentation in that domain. In this context, this
more » ... explores a machine learning-based approach for generating synthetic eye-tracking data. We explore a novel application of variational autoencoders (VAEs) in this regard. More specifically, a VAE model is trained to generate an image-based representation of the eye-tracking output, so-called scanpaths. Overall, our results validate that the VAE model could generate a plausible output from a limited dataset. Finally, it is empirically demonstrated that such approach could be employed as a mechanism for data augmentation to improve the performance in classification tasks.
doi:10.3390/jimaging7050083 pmid:34460679 pmcid:PMC8321343 fatcat:bihahevljrat5gaddcwgjk3tlq