Analysis of Human Attention toward Context-Related Images for Understanding Visual Information Processing

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand human's visual information processing mechanisms. We emphasize the importance of "context" for attracting visual attention as an effect of top-down process. We created indices for saliency index by degree of saliency using Itti's saliency model and for context index by object importance from pre-experimental survey for analyzing the present data. In terms of bottom-up process, the effect of bottom-up saliency was insignificant and correlation between the saliency map and human fixation map was rather low. We compared the context index within both salient and non-salient area that top-down processing is a strong attentional guidance. If the contextually meaningful objects and visually salient area was overlapped, it robustly attracts attentions. Furthermore, the counts of fixations on objects and the order in sequence of eye-movement showed that the subjects tended to fixate more often and more frequently toward more importantly considered objects.