Exploiting Object Features in Deep Gaze Prediction Models

Abstract The human visual system analyzes the complex scenes rapidly. It devotes the limited perceptual resources to the most salient subsets and/or objects of scenes while ignoring their less salient parts. Gaze prediction models try to predict the human eye fixations (human gaze) under free-viewing conditions while imitating the attentive mechanism. Previous studies on saliency benchmark datasets have shown that visual attention is affected by the salient objects of the scenes and their features. These features include the identity, the location, and the visual features of objects in the scenes, beside to the context of the input image. Moreover, the human eye fixations often converge to the specific parts of salient objects in the scenes. In this paper, we propose a deep gaze prediction model using object detection via image segmentation. It uses some deep neural modules to find the identity, location, and visual features of the salient objects in the scenes. In addition, we introduce a deep module to capture the prior bias of human eye fixations. To evaluate our model, several challenging saliency benchmark datasets are used in the experiments. We also conduct an ablation study to show the effectiveness of our proposed modules and its architecture. Despite its fewer parameters, our model has comparable, or even better performance on some datasets, to the state-of-the-art saliency models.