The Active Sampling of Gaze-Shifts

Abstract

Abstract. The ability to predict, given an image or a video, where a human might fixate elements of a viewed scene has long been of interest in the vision community.In this note we propose a different view of the gaze-shift mechanism as that of a motor system implementation of an active random sampling strategy that the Human Visual System has evolved in order to efficiently and effectively infer properties of the surrounding world. We show how it can be exploited to carry on an attentive analysis of dynamic scenes.

Ecological Sampling of Gaze Shifts

“…1) A novel and general probabilistic framework for eye guidance on complex time-varying scenes is provided, which revises an early conjecture presented in [22] and grounds its assumptions on empirical analysis of eyetracked data. 2) The ES guidance mechanism can mimic variability in scanpaths close to that exhibited by human subjects.…”

“…Different from [22], the visible features serve the purpose of structuring the habitat W(t) in terms of a landscape S(t) and a set of landscape patches…”

“…This allows to treat different types of eye movements within the same framework, thus making a step toward the unified modeling of different kinds of gaze shifts, which is a recent trend in eye movement research [23], [24]. 4) The gaze is deployed at patches, i.e., proto-objects, rather than points (differently from [22]). Thus, the eye guidance mechanism could be straightforwardly integrated with a probabilistic object or context-based visual attention scheme [6], [7].…”

“…A preliminary attempt toward a composite sampling strategy for modeling gaze shift mechanisms has been presented in [22]. However, that approach only conjectured a simple binary switch between a Gaussian and a Cauchy-like walk.…”

“…While providing some promising results, the approach lacked of a general framework and did not ground its assumptions on empirical analysis of eye-tracked data. In the paper presented here, experimental data analysis has been exploited to substantially revise [22] and to formulate the general ES model detailed in the following Section.…”