Saliency Map for Visual Perception

Human and other primates move their eyes to select visual information from the scene, psycho-visual experiments (Constantinidis, 2005) suggest that attention is directed to visually salient locations in the image. This allows human beings to bring the fovea onto the relevant parts of the image, to interpret complex scenes in real time. In visual perception, an important result was the discovery of a limited set of visual properties (called pre attentive), detected in the first 200-300 milliseconds of observation of a scene, by the low-level visual system. In last decades many progresses have been made into research of visual perception by analyzing both bottom up (stimulus driven) and top down (task dependent) processes involved in human attention. Visual Saliency deals with identifying fixation points that a human viewer would focus on the first seconds of the observation of a scene

Adaptive Storytelling Through User Understanding

Storytelling, when happening face to face, is a highly interactive process. A good storyteller attracts the audience by continuously observing their responses and adjusting the storytelling accordingly. The goal of this project is to simulate this process in digital storytellers. We created an automatic storytelling system that periodically estimates the user’s preferences and adapts the content in the subsequent storytelling by balancing novelty and topic consistency. We have performed an empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of our approach. The results indicate that gender and age play important roles in affecting one’s subjective experience. For younger subjects, stories with mixed amount of novelty and topic consistency are more preferred while for older subjects, larger amounts of variation are preferred. Additionally, in general, women enjoyed the stories more than men