Quantitative Analysis of Saliency Models

Previous saliency detection research required the reader to evaluate performance qualitatively, based on renderings of saliency maps on a few shapes. This qualitative approach meant it was unclear which saliency models were better, or how well they compared to human perception. This paper provides a quantitative evaluation framework that addresses this issue. In the first quantitative analysis of 3D computational saliency models, we evaluate four computational saliency models and two baseline models against ground-truth saliency collected in previous work.Comment: 10 page

Deep learning models for 3D mesh saliency prediction.

El estudio de la atención visual humana ha sido ampliamente explorado en muchos trabajos. Consiste en detectar e identificar las regiones del estímulo que más llaman la atención del usuario, generalmente utilizando un eye tracker para recolectar los datos. Esta medida de las regiones de interés se conoce como saliencia, y su detección y modelado es un problema fundamental en gráficos por computadora y visión por computadora. Esta tesis de fin de máster presenta un modelo de predicción de salienia para nubes de puntos basado en aprendizaje profundo.<br /

Investigating human-perceptual properties of "shapes" using 3D shapes and 2D fonts

Shapes are generally used to convey meaning. They are used in video games, films and other multimedia, in diverse ways. 3D shapes may be destined for virtual scenes or represent objects to be constructed in the real-world. Fonts add character to an otherwise plain block of text, allowing the writer to make important points more visually prominent or distinct from other text. They can indicate the structure of a document, at a glance. Rather than studying shapes through traditional geometric shape descriptors, we provide alternative methods to describe and analyse shapes, from a lens of human perception. This is done via the concepts of Schelling Points and Image Specificity. Schelling Points are choices people make when they aim to match with what they expect others to choose but cannot communicate with others to determine an answer. We study whole mesh selections in this setting, where Schelling Meshes are the most frequently selected shapes. The key idea behind image Specificity is that different images evoke different descriptions; but ‘Specific’ images yield more consistent descriptions than others. We apply Specificity to 2D fonts. We show that each concept can be learned and predict them for fonts and 3D shapes, respectively, using a depth image-based convolutional neural network. Results are shown for a range of fonts and 3D shapes and we demonstrate that font Specificity and the Schelling meshes concept are useful for visualisation, clustering, and search applications. Overall, we find that each concept represents similarities between their respective type of shape, even when there are discontinuities between the shape geometries themselves. The ‘context’ of these similarities is in some kind of abstract or subjective meaning which is consistent among different people

Metric representations for shape analysis and synthesis

2D and 3D geometric shapes are ubiquitous in computer graphics, computer animation, and computer-aided design and manufacturing. Two of the fundamental research challenges that underline these applications are the analysis and synthesis of shapes, with the former aiming to extract semantically meaningful knowledge of shapes and the latter focusing on generating plausible-looking shapes based on user inputs. Traditionally, shape analysis and synthesis are based on representations such as meshes, parameterisations, and Laplacians, which lead to mostly hand-crafted computation rules that are either suboptimal or treat related tasks separately. In this work, we propose to represent a 2D/3D shape as a square symmetric matrix that correlates every pair of geometric points on the shape, which allows us to formulate shape analysis and synthesis problems as principled optimisation problems that can be globally optimised. To demonstrate the usefulness of our new metric representation for shape analysis, we first address 3D mesh saliency detection by representing a shape as a pairwise feature distance matrix, whose principal eigenvector is experimentally shown to outperform the traditional saliency detection rules for capturing ground truth saliency annotations. Following this work, we then unify saliency detection and nonrigid shape matching via a jointly learned metric representation, which is shown to improve the accuracy of both tasks on the existing saliency detection and shape matching benchmarks. To also demonstrate the usefulness of our metric representation for shape synthesis, we address 2D facial shape beautification in images by representing a facial shape as the orthogonal projection matrix onto 2D facial landmarks, which is shown to improve the attractiveness of both frontal-neutral and non-frontal-non-neutral faces in the user studies. Finally, we show that adversarially learning the distributions of human shapes and poses in a hidden space produces higher quality human samples than in the geometry space. Together, these results show that our metric representation benefits both the analysis and synthesis of shapes, with the potential of unifying more diverse tasks such as part segmentation and labelling in the future work

Cluster-based point set saliency

© 2015 IEEE. We propose a cluster-based approach to point set saliency detection, a challenge since point sets lack topological information. A point set is first decomposed into small clusters, using fuzzy clustering. We evaluate cluster uniqueness and spatial distribution of each cluster and combine these values into a cluster saliency function. Finally, the probabilities of points belonging to each cluster are used to assign a saliency to each point. Our approach detects fine-scale salient features and uninteresting regions consistently have lower saliency values. We evaluate the proposed saliency model by testing our saliency-based keypoint detection against a 3D interest point detection benchmark. The evaluation shows that our method achieves a good balance between false positive and false negative error rates, without using any topological information