Video attention prediction using gaze saliency

Abstract

In recent years, the significant progress has been achieved in the field of visual saliency modeling. Our research key is in video saliency, which differs substantially from image saliency and could be better detected by adding the gaze information from the movement of eyes while people are looking at the video. In this paper we purposed a novel gaze saliency method to predict video attention, which is inspired by the widespread usage of mobile smart devices with camera. It is a non-contacted method to predict visual attention, and it does not bring the burden on the hardware. Our method first extracts the bottom-up saliency maps from the video frames, and then constructs the mapping from eye images obtained by the camera in synchronization with the video frames to the screen region. Finally the combination between top-down gaze information and bottom-up saliency maps is conducted by point-wise multiplication to predict the video attention. Furthermore, the proposed approach is validated on the two datasets: one is the public dataset MIT, the other is the dataset we collected, versus other four usual methods, and the experiment results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art.