Multimodal human attention detection for reading

Affective computing in human-computer interaction research enables computers to understand human affects or emotions to provide better service. In this paper, we investigate the detection of human attention useful in intelligent e-learning applications. Our principle is to use only ubiquitous hardware available in most computer systems, namely, webcam and mouse. Information from multiple modalities is fused together for effective human attention detection. We invite human subjects to carry out experiments in reading articles being subjected to different kinds of distraction to induce different attention levels. Machine-learning techniques are applied to identify useful features to recognize human attention level. Our results indicate improved performance with multimodal inputs, suggesting an interesting affective computing direction.