This paper presents a novel fixation prediction and saliency modeling framework based on inter-image similarities and ensemble of Extreme Learning Machines (ELM). The proposed framework is inspired by two observations, (1) the contextual information of a scene along with low-level visual cues modulates attention, (2) the influence of scene memorability on eye movement patterns caused by the resemblance of a scene to a former visual experience. Motivated by such observations, we develop a framework that estimates the saliency of a given image using an ensemble of extreme learners, each trained on an image similar to the input image. That is, after retrieving a set of similar images for a given image, a saliency predictor is learnt from each of the images in the retrieved image set using an ELM, resulting in an ensemble. The saliency of the given image is then measured in terms of the mean of predicted saliency value by the ensembles members.
Deep Gaze I @cite_64 utilizes CNNs for the fixation prediction task by treating saliency prediction as point processing. Despite this model is justified differently than @cite_39 and @cite_60 , in practice, it boils down to the same framework. Nonetheless, the objective function to be minimized is slightly different due to the explicit incorporation of the center-bias factor and the imposed sparsity constraint in the framework. SalNet @cite_89 is another technique that employs a CNN-based architecture, where the last layer is a deconvolution. The first convolution layers are initialized by the VGG16 @cite_56 and the deconvolution is learnt by fine-tuning the architecture for fixation prediction.
@cite_64 @cite_60 @cite_89 @cite_56 @cite_39
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For many applications in graphics, design, and human computer interaction, it is essential to understand where humans look in a scene. Where eye tracking devices are not a viable option, models of saliency can be used to predict fixation locations. Most saliency approaches are based on bottom-up computation that does not consider top-down image semantics and often does not match actual eye movements. To address this problem, we collected eye tracking data of 15 viewers on 1003 images and use this database as training and testing examples to learn a model of saliency based on low, middle and high-level image features. This large database of eye tracking data is publicly available with this paper. The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. Two designs are proposed: a shallow convnet trained from scratch, and a another deeper solution whose first three layers are adapted from another network trained for classification. To the authors knowledge, these are the first end-to-end CNNs trained and tested for the purpose of saliency prediction. In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision. Saliency prediction typically relies on hand-crafted (multiscale) features that are combined in different ways to form a "master" saliency map, which encodes local image conspicuity. Recent improvements to the state of the art on standard benchmarks such as MIT1003 have been achieved mostly by incrementally adding more and more hand-tuned features (such as car or face detectors) to existing models. In contrast, we here follow an entirely automatic data-driven approach that performs a large-scale search for optimal features. We identify those instances of a richly-parameterized bio-inspired model family (hierarchical neuromorphic networks) that successfully predict image saliency. Because of the high dimensionality of this parameter space, we use automated hyperparameter optimization to efficiently guide the search. The optimal blend of such multilayer features combined with a simple linear classifier achieves excellent performance on several image saliency benchmarks. Our models outperform the state of the art on MIT1003, on which features and classifiers are learned. Without additional training, these models generalize well to two other image saliency data sets, Toronto and NUSEF, despite their different image content. Finally, our algorithm scores best of all the 23 models evaluated to date on the MIT300 saliency challenge, which uses a hidden test set to facilitate an unbiased comparison.