Empirical Validation of the Saliency-based Model of Visual Attention

Visual attention is the ability of the human vision system to detect salient parts of the scene, on which higher vision tasks, such as recognition, can focus. In human vision, it is believed that visual attention is intimately linked to the eye movements and that the fixation points correspond to th...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Ouerhani, Nabil, Wartburg, Roman von, Hugli, Heinz, Müri, René
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2004
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:24303
Acesso em linha:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/24303
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/elcvia.66
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Visual Attention
Saliency Map
Empirical Validation
Human Perception
Eye Movements
Atenció visual
Mapa de notabilitat
Mapa d'atenció Saliency
Validació empírica
Percepció humana
Moviments oculars
Atención visual
Mapa de notabilidad
Mapa de atención Saliency
Validación empírica
Percepción humana
Movimientos oculares
Descrição
Resumo:Visual attention is the ability of the human vision system to detect salient parts of the scene, on which higher vision tasks, such as recognition, can focus. In human vision, it is believed that visual attention is intimately linked to the eye movements and that the fixation points correspond to the location of the salient scene parts. In computer vision, the paradigm of visual attention has been widely investigated and a saliency-based model of visual attention is now available that is commonly accepted and used in the field, despite the fact that its biological grounding has not been fully assessed. This work proposes a new method for quantitatively assessing the plausibility of this model by comparing its performance with human behavior. The basic idea is to compare the map of attention - the saliency map - produced by the computational model with a fixation density map derived from eye movement experiments. This human attention map can be constructed as an integral of single impulses located at the positions of the successive fixation points. The resulting map has the same format as the computer-generated map, and can easily be compared by qualitative and quantitative methods. Some illustrative examples using a set of natural and synthetic color images show the potential of the validation method to assess the plausibility of the attention model.