Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large scale dynamic computer vision annotated datasets like Hollywood-2 and UCF Sports with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of the visual action recognition task. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video, vision.imar.ro eyetracking (497,107 frames, each viewed by 16 subjects), unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance, (b) dynamic, video stimuli, (c) task control, as opposed to free-viewing. Second, we introduce novel sequential consistency and alignment measures, which underline the remarkable stability of patterns of visual search among subjects. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatio-temporal interest point image sampling strategies and the human fixations, as well as their impact for visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results.
The problem of visual attention and the prediction of visual saliency have long been of interest in the human vision community @cite_0 @cite_52 @cite_2 . Recently there was a growing trend of training visual saliency models based on human fixations, mostly in static images (with the notable exception of @cite_57 ), and under subject free-viewing conditions @cite_55 @cite_11 . While visual saliency models can be evaluated in isolation under a variety of measures against human fixations, for computer vision, their ultimate test remains the demonstration of relevance within an end-to-end automatic visual recognition pipeline. While such integrated systems are still in their infancy, promising demonstrations have recently emerged for computer vision tasks like scene classification @cite_39 , verifying correlations with object (pedestrian) detection responses @cite_50 @cite_48 . An interesting early biologically inspired recognition system was presented by @cite_57 , who learn a fixation operator from human eye movements collected under video free-viewing, then learn action classification models for the KTH dataset with promising results. Recently, under the constraint of a first person perspective, Fathi et. al. @cite_56 have shown that human fixations can be predicted and used to enhance action recognition performance.
@cite_48 @cite_55 @cite_52 @cite_39 @cite_0 @cite_57 @cite_56 @cite_50 @cite_2 @cite_11
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In many computer vision tasks, the relevant information to solve the problem at hand is mixed to irrelevant, distracting information. This has motivated researchers to design attentional models that can dynamically focus on parts of images or videos that are salient, e.g., by down-weighting irrelevant pixels. In this work, we propose a spatiotemporal attentional model that learns where to look in a video directly from human fixation data. We model visual attention with a mixture of Gaussians at each frame. This distribution is used to express the probability of saliency for each pixel. Time consistency in videos is modeled hierarchically by: 1) deep 3D convolutional features to represent spatial and short-term time relations and 2) a long short-term memory network on top that aggregates the clip-level representation of sequential clips and therefore expands the temporal domain from few frames to seconds. The parameters of the proposed model are optimized via maximum likelihood estimation using human fixations as training data, without knowledge of the action in each video. Our experiments on Hollywood2 show state-of-the-art performance on saliency prediction for video. We also show that our attentional model trained on Hollywood2 generalizes well to UCF101 and it can be leveraged to improve action classification accuracy on both datasets. Several visual attention models have been proposed for describing eye movements over simple stimuli and tasks such as free viewing or visual search. Yet, to date, there exists no computational framework that can reliably mimic human gaze behavior in more complex environments and tasks such as urban driving. In addition, benchmark datasets, scoring techniques, and top-down model architectures are not yet well understood. In this paper, we describe new task-dependent approaches for modeling top-down overt visual attention based on graphical models for probabilistic inference and reasoning. We describe a dynamic Bayesian network that infers probability distributions over attended objects and spatial locations directly from observed data. Probabilistic inference in our model is performed over object-related functions that are fed from manual annotations of objects in video scenes or by state-of-the-art object detection recognition algorithms. Evaluating over approximately 3 h (approximately 315 000 eye fixations and 12 000 saccades) of observers playing three video games (time-scheduling, driving, and flight combat), we show that our approach is significantly more predictive of eye fixations compared to: 1) simpler classifier-based models also developed here that map a signature of a scene (multimodal information from gist, bottom-up saliency, physical actions, and events) to eye positions; 2) 14 state-of-the-art bottom-up saliency models; and 3) brute-force algorithms such as mean eye position. Our results show that the proposed model is more effective in employing and reasoning over spatio-temporal visual data compared with the state-of-the-art. 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. Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in ‘saccade and fixate’ regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large scale dynamic computer vision annotated datasets like Hollywood-2 [1] and UCF Sports [2] with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of visual action and scene context recognition tasks. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video, vision.imar.ro eyetracking (497,107 frames, each viewed by 19 subjects), unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance, (b) dynamic, video stimuli, (c) task control, as well as free-viewing . Second, we introduce novel dynamic consistency and alignment measures , which underline the remarkable stability of patterns of visual search among subjects. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatio-temporal interest point image sampling strategies and the human fixations, as well as their impact for visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results. In this paper, we aim to predict human eye fixation with view-free scenes based on an end-to-end deep learning architecture. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made substantial improvement on human attention prediction, it is still needed to improve the CNN-based attention models by efficiently leveraging multi-scale features. Our visual attention network is proposed to capture hierarchical saliency information from deep, coarse layers with global saliency information to shallow, fine layers with local saliency response. Our model is based on a skip-layer network structure, which predicts human attention from multiple convolutional layers with various reception fields. Final saliency prediction is achieved via the cooperation of those global and local predictions. Our model is learned in a deep supervision manner, where supervision is directly fed into multi-level layers, instead of previous approaches of providing supervision only at the output layer and propagating this supervision back to earlier layers. Our model thus incorporates multi-level saliency predictions within a single network, which significantly decreases the redundancy of previous approaches of learning multiple network streams with different input scales. Extensive experimental analysis on various challenging benchmark data sets demonstrate our method yields the state-of-the-art performance with competitive inference time. 1 1 Our source code is available at https: github.com wenguanwang deepattention . Systems based on bag-of-words models operating on image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been extremely successful for both computer-based visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in "saccade and fixate" regimes, the knowledge, methodology, and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement existing state-of-the art large-scale dynamic computer vision datasets like Hollywood-2[1] and UCF Sports[2] with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of the visual action recognition task. To our knowledge these are the first massive human eye tracking datasets of significant size to be collected for video (497,107 frames, each viewed by 16 subjects), unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance, (b) dynamic, video stimuli, (c) task control, as opposed to free-viewing. Second, we introduce novel dynamic consistency and alignment models, which underline the remarkable stability of patterns of visual search among subjects. Third, we leverage the massive amounts of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatio-temporal interest point image sampling strategies and human fixations, as well as their impact for visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the most advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results. The purpose of this paper is the detection of salient areas in natural video by using the new deep learning techniques. Salient patches in video frames are predicted first. Then the predicted visual fixation maps are built upon them. We design the deep architecture on the basis of CaffeNet implemented with Caffe toolkit. We show that changing the way of data selection for optimisation of network parameters, we can save computation cost up to @math times. We extend deep learning approaches for saliency prediction in still images with RGB values to specificity of video using the sensitivity of the human visual system to residual motion. Furthermore, we complete primary colour pixel values by contrast features proposed in classical visual attention prediction models. The experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets. The first is IRCCYN video database containing @math videos with an overall amount of @math frames and eye fixations of @math subjects. The second one is HOLLYWOOD2 provided @math movie clips with the eye fixations of @math subjects. On IRCYYN dataset, the accuracy obtained is of @math . On HOLLYWOOD2 dataset, results in prediction of saliency of patches show the improvement up to @math with regard to RGB use only. The resulting accuracy of @math is obtained. The AUC metric in comparison of predicted saliency maps with visual fixation maps shows the increase up to @math on a sample of video clips from this dataset. Human vision system actively seeks salient regions and movements in video sequences to reduce the search effort. Modeling computational visual saliency map provides important information for semantic understanding in many real world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel video saliency detection model for detecting the attended regions that correspond to both interesting objects and dominant motions in video sequences. In spatial saliency map, we inherit the classical bottom-up spatial saliency map. In temporal saliency map, a novel optical flow model is proposed based on the dynamic consistency of motion. The spatial and the temporal saliency maps are constructed and further fused together to create a novel attention model. The proposed attention model is evaluated on three video datasets. Empirical validations demonstrate the salient regions detected by our dynamic consistent saliency map highlight the interesting objects effectively and efficiency. More importantly, the automatically video attended regions detected by proposed attention model are consistent with the ground truth saliency maps of eye movement data. Under natural viewing conditions, human observers shift their gaze to allocate processing resources to subsets of the visual input. Many computational models try to predict such voluntary eye and attentional shifts. Although the important role of high level stimulus properties (e.g., semantic information) in search stands undisputed, most models are based on low-level image properties. We here demonstrate that a combined model of face detection and low-level saliency significantly outperforms a low-level model in predicting locations humans fixate on, based on eye-movement recordings of humans observing photographs of natural scenes, most of which contained at least one person. Observers, even when not instructed to look for anything particular, fixate on a face with a probability of over 80 within their first two fixations; furthermore, they exhibit more similar scan-paths when faces are present. Remarkably, our model's predictive performance in images that do not contain faces is not impaired, and is even improved in some cases by spurious face detector responses. 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.