Extraction of visual attention with gaze duration and saliency map

Abstract

Measurement of gaze is effective to evaluate human operator's attention, one's operation skills, perceptional capability and so on. Especially, gaze duration, called fixation time, is often utilized. Generally, it is said that long fixation time is detected when the operator pays attention to something intentionally. However, the duration also depends on saliency of displayed image, especially humans' perception characteristics are sensitive to intensities of an image. Although a lot of researchers have presented models of visual attention with the saliency map, the high saliency may attract a human gaze even if he/she do not have attention. Therefore, in order to estimate the human attention, we consider human vision characteristics with foveal vision. The foveal vision is used for scrutinizing highly detailed objects, and it also may relate to the attention. In this paper, we propose a new approach to estimate human visual attention by checking gaze duration and a saliency map considering human foveal vision characteristics. The estimation technique was experimented with five participants, and as the results, we found the technique makes aware of the attention more than conventional technique which considers only gaze duration.