The Saliency Model Implementation Library for Experimental Research (SMILER) is a new software package which provides an open, standardized, and extensible framework for maintaining and executing computational saliency models. This work drastically reduces the human effort required to apply saliency algorithms to new tasks and datasets, while also ensuring consistency and procedural correctness for results and conclusions produced by different parties. At its launch SMILER already includes twenty three saliency models (fourteen models based in MATLAB and nine supported through containerization), and the open design of SMILER encourages this number to grow with future contributions from the community. The project may be downloaded and contributed to through its GitHub page: this https URL
It should be noted that the current collection of models supported by SMILER consists of models which focus on pixel-wise assignment of conspicuity values and which have been predominantly applied to the domain of human fixation prediction. There are, however, other branches of saliency model research, such as salient object detection ( see @cite_27 for an early example, and @cite_46 for an overview and recent survey). Likewise, the models included are predominantly focused on saliency prediction over static scenes, but there is nevertheless significant interest in saliency over dynamic stimuli ( see @cite_19 @cite_12 @cite_59 ). This focus on models which are more representative of fixation prediction over static images is not intended to dismiss or ignore these other research avenues, but rather is meant to form a solid base for the SMILER platform.
@cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_59 @cite_46 @cite_12
2158983298 2217598536 2804567257 2028087473
Despite significant recent progress, the best available visual saliency models still lag behind human performance in predicting eye fixations in free-viewing of natural scenes. Majority of models are based on low-level visual features and the importance of top-down factors has not yet been fully explored or modeled. Here, we combine low-level features such as orientation, color, intensity, saliency maps of previous best bottom-up models with top-down cognitive visual features (e.g., faces, humans, cars, etc.) and learn a direct mapping from those features to eye fixations using Regression, SVM, and AdaBoost classifiers. By extensive experimenting over three benchmark eye-tracking datasets using three popular evaluation scores, we show that our boosting model outperforms 27 state-of-the-art models and is so far the closest model to the accuracy of human model for fixation prediction. Furthermore, our model successfully detects the most salient object in a scene without sophisticated image processings such as region segmentation. On a minute-to-minute basis people undergo numerous fluid interactions with objects that barely register on a conscious level. Recent neuroscientific research demonstrates that humans have a fixed size prior for salient objects. This suggests that a salient object in 3D undergoes a consistent transformation such that people's visual system perceives it with an approximately fixed size. This finding indicates that there exists a consistent egocentric object prior that can be characterized by shape, size, depth, and location in the first person view. In this paper, we develop an EgoObject Representation, which encodes these characteristics by incorporating shape, location, size and depth features from an egocentric RGBD image. We empirically show that this representation can accurately characterize the egocentric object prior by testing it on an egocentric RGBD dataset for three tasks: the 3D saliency detection, future saliency prediction, and interaction classification. This representation is evaluated on our new Egocentric RGBD Saliency dataset that includes various activities such as cooking, dining, and shopping. By using our EgoObject representation, we outperform previously proposed models for saliency detection (relative 30 improvement for 3D saliency detection task) on our dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate that this representation allows us to predict future salient objects based on the gaze cue and classify people's interactions with objects. The past decade has witnessed the use of high-level features in saliency prediction for both videos and images. Unfortunately, the existing saliency prediction methods only handle high-level static features, such as face. In fact, high-level dynamic features (also called actions), such as speaking or head turning, are also extremely attractive to visual attention in videos. Thus, in this paper, we propose a data-driven method for learning to predict the saliency of multiple-face videos, by leveraging both static and dynamic features at high-level. Specifically, we introduce an eye-tracking database, collecting the fixations of 39 subjects viewing 65 multiple-face videos. Through analysis on our database, we find a set of high-level features that cause a face to receive extensive visual attention. These high-level features include the static features of face size, center-bias and head pose, as well as the dynamic features of speaking and head turning. Then, we present the techniques for extracting these high-level features. Afterwards, a novel model, namely multiple hidden Markov model (M-HMM), is developed in our method to enable the transition of saliency among faces. In our M-HMM, the saliency transition takes into account both the state of saliency at previous frames and the observed high-level features at the current frame. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods in predicting visual attention on multiple-face videos. Finally, we shed light on a promising implementation of our saliency prediction method in locating the region-of-interest, for video conference compression with high efficiency video coding. In this paper, we present a novel model for saliency prediction under a unified framework of feature integration. The model distinguishes itself by directly learning from natural images and automatically incorporating higher-level semantic information in a scalable manner for gaze prediction. Unlike most existing saliency models that rely on specific features or object detectors, our model learns multiple stages of features that mimic the hierarchical organization of the ventral stream in the visual cortex and integrate them by adapting their weights based on the ground-truth fixation data. To accomplish this, we utilize a multi-layer sparse network to learn low-, mid- and high-level features from natural images and train a linear support vector machine (SVM) for weight adaption and feature integration. Experimental results show that our model could learn high-level semantic features like faces and texts and can perform competitively among existing approaches in predicting eye fixations.