In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based video saliency prediction method, named DeepVS. Specifically, we establish a large-scale eye-tracking database of videos (LEDOV), which includes 32 subjects’ fixations on 538 videos. We find from LEDOV that human attention is more likely to be attracted by objects, particularly the moving objects or the moving parts of objects. Hence, an object-to-motion convolutional neural network (OM-CNN) is developed to predict the intra-frame saliency for DeepVS, which is composed of the objectness and motion subnets. In OM-CNN, cross-net mask and hierarchical feature normalization are proposed to combine the spatial features of the objectness subnet and the temporal features of the motion subnet. We further find from our database that there exists a temporal correlation of human attention with a smooth saliency transition across video frames. We thus propose saliency-structured convolutional long short-term memory (SS-ConvLSTM) network, using the extracted features from OM-CNN as the input. Consequently, the inter-frame saliency maps of a video can be generated, which consider both structured output with center-bias and cross-frame transitions of human attention maps. Finally, the experimental results show that DeepVS advances the state-of-the-art in video saliency prediction.
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.