Pose and Visual Attention: Exploring the Effects of 3D Shape Near-Isometric Deformations on Gaze

Recent research in 3D shape analysis focuses on the study of visual attention on rendered 3D shapes investigating the impact of different factors such as material, illumination, and camera movements. In this paper, we analyze how the pose of a deformable shape affects visual attention. We describe an eye-tracking experiment that studied the influence of different poses of non-rigid 3D shapes on visual attention. The subjects free-viewed a set of 3D shapes rendered in different poses and from different camera views. The fixation maps obtained by the aggregated gaze data were projected onto the 3D shapes and compared at vertex level. The results indicate an impact of the pose for some of the tested shapes and also that view variation influences visual attention. The qualitative analysis of the 3D fixation maps shows high visual focus on the facial regions regardless of the pose, coherent with previous works. The visual attention variation between poses appears to correspond to geometric salient features and semantically salient parts linked to the action represented by the pose.