Evaluating Visual Realism of AI-Generated Videos with Eye Tracking

Danqing Shi, Lan Jiang, Jake Lyons, Miri Zilka

Human evaluation of AI-generated videos has so far relied on explicit human feedback, such as judgments or ratings. While these signals capture the conclusions viewers reach, they fail to offer insights into the perception that leads to them. This paper investigates eye tracking as a complementary human evaluation signal for AI-generated videos. We conducted two Visual Turing Test (VTT) experiments with a total of 90 participants on videos generated by latest generative models, in which participants watched each video twice and then gave their feedback. Across the experiments, we collected 4,286 valid eye-tracking trials on 438 videos. Our analysis indicates that gaze patterns offer informative evaluation signals that align with explicit human feedback. Building on the findings, we propose the first computational method GazeEval to predict the perceived visual realism of AI-generated videos from eye-tracking data. It achieves 71.3% accuracy in prediction, providing evidence that eye tracking data carries informative signals about how people evaluate a video. We release the study data to support further research on eye tracking for evaluating AI-generated video.