This paper introduces a new framework to predict visual attention of omnidirectional images. The key setup of our architecture is the simultaneous prediction of the saliency map and a corresponding scanpath for a given stimulus. The framework implements a fully encoder-decoder convolutional neural network augmented by an attention module to generate representative saliency maps. In addition, an auxiliary network is employed to generate probable viewport center fixation points through the SoftArgMax function. The latter allows to derive fixation points from feature maps. To take advantage of the scanpath prediction, an adaptive joint probability distribution model is then applied to construct the final unbiased saliency map by leveraging the encoder decoder-based saliency map and the scanpath-based saliency heatmap. The proposed framework was evaluated in terms of saliency and scanpath prediction, and the results were compared to state-of-the-art methods on Salient360! dataset. The results showed the relevance of our framework and the benefits of such architecture for further omnidirectional visual attention prediction tasks.
Institute for Visualisation and Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学可视化与交互系统研究所）
We propose Unified Model of Saliency and Scanpaths (UMSS) -- a model that learns to predict visual saliency and scanpaths (i.e. sequences of eye fixations) on information visualisations. Although scanpaths provide rich information about the importance of different visualisation elements during the visual exploration process, prior work has been limited to predicting aggregated attention statistics, such as visual saliency. We present in-depth analyses of gaze behaviour for different information visualisation elements (e.g. Title, Label, Data) on the popular MASSVIS dataset. We show that while,…
The last years have seen a surge in models predicting the scanpaths of fixations made by humans when viewing images. However, the field is lacking a principled comparison of those models with respect to their predictive power. In the past, models have usually been evaluated based on comparing human scanpaths to scanpaths generated from the model. Here, instead we evaluate models based on how well they predict each fixation in a scanpath given the previous scanpath history. This makes model evaluation closely aligned with the biological processes thought to underly scanpath generation and allow…
University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；University of Siena（锡耶纳大学）
In the last three decades, human visual attention has been a topic of great interest in various disciplines. In computer vision, many models have been proposed to predict the distribution of human fixations on a visual stimulus. Recently, thanks to the creation of large collections of data, machine learning algorithms have obtained state-of-the-art performance on the task of saliency map estimation. On the other hand, computational models of scanpath are much less studied. Works are often only descriptive or task specific. This is due to the fact that the scanpath is harder to model because it…
Laboratoire PRISME, Université d'Orléans（奥尔良大学PRISME实验室）；Institut National Des Télécommunications et TIC（国家电信与信息通信技术学院）
Human vision is naturally more attracted by some regions within their field of view than others. This intrinsic selectivity mechanism, so-called visual attention, is influenced by both high- and low-level factors; such as the global environment (illumination, background texture, etc.), stimulus characteristics (color, intensity, orientation, etc.), and some prior visual information. Visual attention is useful for many computer vision applications such as image compression, recognition, and captioning. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep-based method, so-called SALYPATH (SALiencY and s…
OpenSAL360: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Platform for Omnidirectional Video Saliency Collection
AI Center, Lomonosov Moscow State University（莫斯科国立大学人工智能中心）；MSU Institute for Artificial Intelligence（莫斯科国立大学人工智能研究所）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（莫斯科国立大学）
Quality Assessment and Distortion-aware Saliency Prediction for AI-Generated Omnidirectional Images
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（图像通信与网络工程研究所，上海交通大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Polytech Nantes, Université de Nantes（南特理工大学）
University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；University of Siena（锡耶纳大学）
The understanding of where humans look in a scene is a problem of great interest in visual perception and computer vision. When eye-tracking devices are not a viable option, models of human attention can be used to predict fixations. In this paper we give two contribution. First, we show a model of visual attention that is simply based on deep convolutional neural networks trained for object classification tasks. A method for visualizing saliency maps is defined which is evaluated in a saliency prediction task. Second, we integrate the information of these maps with a bottom-up differential mo…
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC)（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Insight Center for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
We introduce SaltiNet, a deep neural network for scanpath prediction trained on 360-degree images. The model is based on a temporal-aware novel representation of saliency information named the saliency volume. The first part of the network consists of a model trained to generate saliency volumes, whose parameters are fit by back-propagation computed from a binary cross entropy (BCE) loss over downsampled versions of the saliency volumes. Sampling strategies over these volumes are used to generate scanpaths over the 360-degree images. Our experiments show the advantages of using saliency volume…
Instituto del Cálculo, Universidad de Buenos Aires – CONICET（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学计算研究所 – CONICET）
Finding objects is essential for almost any daily-life visual task. Saliency models have been useful to predict fixation locations in natural images, but are static, i.e., they provide no information about the time-sequence of fixations. Nowadays, one of the biggest challenges in the field is to go beyond saliency maps to predict a sequence of fixations related to a visual task, such as searching for a given target. Bayesian observer models have been proposed for this task, as they represent visual search as an active sampling process. Nevertheless, they were mostly evaluated on artificial ima…
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院）；Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学生物医学工程系）；Dept. of Instrumentation and Control Engineering, NIT Trichy（印度国立理工学院蒂鲁奇拉帕利分校仪器与控制工程系）；Dept. of Otolaryngology, Singapore General Hospital（新加坡中央医院耳鼻喉科）
Representation learning of the task-oriented attention while tracking instrument holds vast potential in image-guided robotic surgery. Incorporating cognitive ability to automate the camera control enables the surgeon to concentrate more on dealing with surgical instruments. The objective is to reduce the operation time and facilitate the surgery for both surgeons and patients. We propose an end-to-end trainable Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning (ST-MTL) model with a shared encoder and spatio-temporal decoders for the real-time surgical instrument segmentation and task-oriented saliency dete…
When watching omnidirectional images (ODIs), subjects can access different viewports by moving their heads. Therefore, it is necessary to predict subjects' head fixations on ODIs. Inspired by generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), this paper proposes a novel approach to predict saliency of head fixations on ODIs, named SalGAIL. First, we establish a dataset for attention on ODIs (AOI). In contrast to traditional datasets, our AOI dataset is large-scale, which contains the head fixations of 30 subjects viewing 600 ODIs. Next, we mine our AOI dataset and determine three findings: (1) …
360$^\circ$ video saliency detection is one of the challenging benchmarks for 360$^\circ$ video understanding since non-negligible distortion and discontinuity occur in the projection of any format of 360$^\circ$ videos, and capture-worthy viewpoint in the omnidirectional sphere is ambiguous by nature. We present a new framework named Panoramic Vision Transformer (PAVER). We design the encoder using Vision Transformer with deformable convolution, which enables us not only to plug pretrained models from normal videos into our architecture without additional modules or finetuning but also to per…
The prediction of Visual Attention data from any kind of media is of valuable use to content creators and used to efficiently drive encoding algorithms. With the current trend in the Virtual Reality (VR) field, adapting known techniques to this new kind of media is starting to gain momentum. In this paper, we present an architectural extension to any Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to fine-tune traditional 2D saliency prediction to Omnidirectional Images (ODIs) in an end-to-end manner. We show that each step in the proposed pipeline works towards making the generated saliency map more accur…
Spherical Vision Transformers for Audio-Visual Saliency Prediction in 360-Degree Videos
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Koç University（计算机科学与工程系，科克大学）；Department of Psychology, Boğaziçi University（心理学系，博多伊大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Intelligent Platforms Research Institute（国家先进工业科学与技术研究院（AIST），智能平台研究机构）；Department of Psychology, Boğaziçi University University（心理学系，博多伊大学）；Department of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University（计算机工程系，哈切塞特佩大学）；KUIS AI Center（KUIS人工智能中心）
Due to the strong correlation between visual attention and perceptual quality, many methods attempt to use human saliency information for image quality assessment. Although this mechanism can get good performance, the networks require human saliency labels, which is not easily accessible for omnidirectional images (ODI). To alleviate this issue, we propose a spatial attention-based perceptual quality prediction network for non-reference quality assessment on ODIs (SAP-net). To drive our SAP-net, we establish a large-scale IQA dataset of ODIs (IQA-ODI), which is composed of subjective scores of…
Human visual attention is a complex phenomenon. A computational modeling of this phenomenon must take into account where people look in order to evaluate which are the salient locations (spatial distribution of the fixations), when they look in those locations to understand the temporal development of the exploration (temporal order of the fixations), and how they move from one location to another with respect to the dynamics of the scene and the mechanics of the eyes (dynamics). State-of-the-art models focus on learning saliency maps from human data, a process that only takes into account the…
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学NUS综合科学与工程研究生院（NGS））；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Michigan-Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学密歇根联合学院）
Directing of the task-specific attention while tracking instrument in surgery holds great potential in robot-assisted intervention. For this purpose, we propose an end-to-end trainable multitask learning (MTL) model for real-time surgical instrument segmentation and attention prediction. Our model is designed with a weight-shared encoder and two task-oriented decoders and optimized for the joint tasks. We introduce batch-Wasserstein (bW) loss and construct a soft attention module to refine the distinctive visual region for efficient saliency learning. For multitask optimization, it is always c…
Traffic accident anticipation is a vital function of Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) for providing a safety-guaranteed driving experience. An accident anticipation model aims to predict accidents promptly and accurately before they occur. Existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) models of accident anticipation lack a human-interpretable explanation of their decision-making. Although these models perform well, they remain a black-box to the ADS users, thus difficult to get their trust. To this end, this paper presents a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network that learns spatio-temporal relational fea…
Blind Stereoscopic Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment Using Predictive Coding Hierarchy
School of Computational and Mathematical Sciences, Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学计算与数学科学学院）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
Omnidirectional images, aka 360 images, can deliver immersive and interactive visual experiences. As their popularity has increased dramatically in recent years, evaluating the quality of 360 images has become a problem of interest since it provides insights for capturing, transmitting, and consuming this new media. However, directly adapting quality assessment methods proposed for standard natural images for omnidirectional data poses certain challenges. These models need to deal with very high-resolution data and implicit distortions due to the spherical form of the images. In this study, we…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学Insight数据分析中心）；Institut National des Télécommunications et des TIC（国家电信与信息通信技术学院）
The spherical domain representation of 360 video/image presents many challenges related to the storage, processing, transmission and rendering of omnidirectional videos (ODV). Models of human visual attention can be used so that only a single viewport is rendered at a time, which is important when developing systems that allow users to explore ODV with head mounted displays (HMD). Accordingly, researchers have proposed various saliency models for 360 video/images. This paper proposes ATSal, a novel attention based (head-eye) saliency model for 360\degree videos. The attention mechanism explici…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
360° images are informative -- it contains omnidirectional visual information around the camera. However, the areas that cover a 360° image is much larger than the human's field of view, therefore important information in different view directions is easily overlooked. To tackle this issue, we propose a method for predicting the optimal set of Region of Interest (RoI) from a single 360° image using the visual saliency as a clue. To deal with the scarce, strongly biased training data of existing single 360° image saliency prediction dataset, we also propose a data augmentation method based on t…
In the process of making a movie, directors constantly care about where the spectator will look on the screen. Shot composition, framing, camera movements or editing are tools commonly used to direct attention. In order to provide a quantitative analysis of the relationship between those tools and gaze patterns, we propose a new eye-tracking database, containing gaze pattern information on movie sequences, as well as editing annotations, and we show how state-of-the-art computational saliency techniques behave on this dataset. In this work, we expose strong links between movie editing and spec…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；La Trobe University（乐卓博大学）
Thanks to the ability of providing an immersive and interactive experience, the uptake of 360 degree image content has been rapidly growing in consumer and industrial applications. Compared to planar 2D images, saliency prediction for 360 degree images is more challenging due to their high resolutions and spherical viewing ranges. Currently, most high-performance saliency prediction models for omnidirectional images (ODIs) rely on deeper or broader convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which benefit from CNNs' superior feature representation capabilities while suffering from their high computa…
Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers
Université de Tours（图尔大学）；Université d’Orléans（奥尔良大学）；Université Sorbonne Paris Nord（索邦巴黎北大学）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital content onto the reality. In AR system, correct and precise estimations of user's visual fixations and head movements can enhance the quality of experience by allocating more computation resources on the areas of interest. However, there is inadequate research about understanding the visual exploration of users when using an AR system or modeling AR visual attention. To bridge the gap between the saliency prediction on real-world scene and on scene augmented by virtual information, we construct the ARVR saliency dataset with 12 diverse videos viewed by 2…
