TF-IDF based Scene-Object Relations Correlate With Visual Attention

Abstract

The relative contribution of bottom-up and top-down attentional guidance is a central topic in vision research. Whereas attention is guided bottom-up by low-level saliency, top-down guidance involves the viewer’s knowledge and expectations accumulated throughout a lifetime. Here we explore the influence of high-level scene-object relations on viewing behavior. To assess top-down guidance, we score the relevance of linguistic object labels using methods from document analysis. Specifically, we computed the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), a statistic that reflects how important a term is to a document. We use object TF-IDF to measure how important a specific object is to a scene category and use these scores to predict eye movement distributions over scenes. Our results show that scene-specific objects are more likely to be fixated. Object TF-IDF had an effect partially independent of image saliency, suggesting that an object’s relevance for a scene category affects attention during scene perception.