In this paper, we proposed an integrated model of semantic-aware and contrast-aware saliency combining both bottom-up and top-down cues for effective saliency estimation and eye fixation prediction. The proposed model processes visual information using two pathways. The first pathway aims to capture the attractive semantic information in images, especially for the presence of meaningful objects and object parts such as human faces. The second pathway is based on multi-scale on-line feature learning and information maximization, which learns an adaptive sparse representation for the input and discovers the high contrast salient patterns within the image context. The two pathways characterize both long-term and short-term attention cues and are integrated dynamically using maxima normalization. We investigate two different implementations of the semantic pathway including an End-to-End deep neural network solution and a dynamic feature integration solution, resulting in the SCA and SCAFI model respectively. Experimental results on artificial images and 5 popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance and better plausibility of the proposed model over both classic approaches and recent deep models.
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. Recent results suggest that state-of-the-art saliency models perform far from optimal in predicting fixations. This lack in performance has been attributed to an inability to model the influence of high-level image features such as objects. Recent seminal advances in applying deep neural networks to tasks like object recognition suggests that they are able to capture this kind of structure. However, the enormous amount of training data necessary to train these networks makes them difficult to apply directly to saliency prediction. We present a novel way of reusing existing neural networks that have been pretrained on the task of object recognition in models of fixation prediction. Using the well-known network of (2012), we come up with a new saliency model that significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models on the MIT Saliency Benchmark. We show that the structure of this network allows new insights in the psychophysics of fixation selection and potentially their neural implementation. To train our network, we build on recent work on the modeling of saliency as point processes. Understanding and predicting the human visual attentional mechanism is an active area of research in the fields of neuroscience and computer vision. In this work, we propose DeepFix, a first-of-its-kind fully convolutional neural network for accurate saliency prediction. Unlike classical works which characterize the saliency map using various hand-crafted features, our model automatically learns features in a hierarchical fashion and predicts saliency map in an end-to-end manner. DeepFix is designed to capture semantics at multiple scales while taking global context into account using network layers with very large receptive fields. Generally, fully convolutional nets are spatially invariant which prevents them from modeling location dependent patterns (e.g. centre-bias). Our network overcomes this limitation by incorporating a novel Location Biased Convolutional layer. We evaluate our model on two challenging eye fixation datasets -- MIT300, CAT2000 and show that it outperforms other recent approaches by a significant margin. Saliency in Context (SALICON) is an ongoing effort that aims at understanding and predicting visual attention. Conventional saliency models typically rely on low-level image statistics to predict human fixations. While these models perform significantly better than chance, there is still a large gap between model prediction and human behavior. This gap is largely due to the limited capability of models in predicting eye fixations with strong semantic content, the so-called semantic gap. This paper presents a focused study to narrow the semantic gap with an architecture based on Deep Neural Network (DNN). It leverages the representational power of high-level semantics encoded in DNNs pretrained for object recognition. Two key components are fine-tuning the DNNs fully convolutionally with an objective function based on the saliency evaluation metrics, and integrating information at different image scales. We compare our method with 14 saliency models on 6 public eye tracking benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that our DNNs can automatically learn features particularly for saliency prediction that surpass by a big margin the state-of-the-art. In addition, our model ranks top to date under all seven metrics on the MIT300 challenge set. In this paper we consider the problem of visual saliency modeling, including both human gaze prediction and salient object segmentation. The overarching goal of the paper is to identify high level considerations relevant to deriving more sophisticated visual saliency models. A deep learning model based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs) is presented, which shows very favorable performance across a wide variety of benchmarks relative to existing proposals. We also demonstrate that the manner in which training data is selected, and ground truth treated is critical to resulting model behaviour. Recent efforts have explored the relationship between human gaze and salient objects, and we also examine this point further in the context of FCNs. Close examination of the proposed and alternative models serves as a vehicle for identifying problems important to developing more comprehensive models going forward. 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.