Age-dependent saccadic models for predicting eye movements

Abstract

How people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models predict not only what observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. Here we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate the gaze patterns from childhood to adulthood. The proposed age-dependent saccadic model not only outputs human-like, i.e. age-specific visual scanpath, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models.