Detection of saccades and postsaccadic oscillations in the presence of smooth pursuit.

A novel algorithm for detection of saccades and postsaccadic oscillations in the presence of smooth pursuit movements is proposed. The method combines saccade detection in the acceleration domain with specialized on- and offset criteria for saccades and postsaccadic oscillations. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by comparing the detection results to those of an existing velocity-based adaptive algorithm and a manually annotated database. The results show that there is a good agreement between the events detected by the proposed algorithm and those in the annotated database with Cohen's kappa around 0.8 for both a development and a test database. In conclusion, the proposed algorithm accurately detects saccades and postsaccadic oscillations as well as intervals of disturbances.