2,286 research outputs found
Objects predict fixations better than early saliency
Humans move their eyes while looking at scenes and pictures. Eye movements correlate with shifts in attention and are thought to be a consequence of optimal resource allocation for high-level tasks such as visual recognition. Models of attention, such as “saliency maps,” are often built on the assumption that “early” features (color, contrast, orientation, motion, and so forth) drive attention directly. We explore an alternative hypothesis: Observers attend to “interesting” objects. To test this hypothesis, we measure the eye position of human observers while they inspect photographs of common natural
scenes. Our observers perform different tasks: artistic evaluation, analysis of content, and search. Immediately after each presentation, our observers are asked to name objects they saw. Weighted with recall frequency, these objects predict fixations in individual images better than early saliency, irrespective of task. Also, saliency combined with object positions predicts which objects are frequently named. This suggests that early saliency has only an indirect effect on attention, acting
through recognized objects. Consequently, rather than treating attention as mere preprocessing step for object recognition, models of both need to be integrated
Human Attention in Image Captioning: Dataset and Analysis
In this work, we present a novel dataset consisting of eye movements and
verbal descriptions recorded synchronously over images. Using this data, we
study the differences in human attention during free-viewing and image
captioning tasks. We look into the relationship between human attention and
language constructs during perception and sentence articulation. We also
analyse attention deployment mechanisms in the top-down soft attention approach
that is argued to mimic human attention in captioning tasks, and investigate
whether visual saliency can help image captioning. Our study reveals that (1)
human attention behaviour differs in free-viewing and image description tasks.
Humans tend to fixate on a greater variety of regions under the latter task,
(2) there is a strong relationship between described objects and attended
objects ( of the described objects are being attended), (3) a
convolutional neural network as feature encoder accounts for human-attended
regions during image captioning to a great extent (around ), (4)
soft-attention mechanism differs from human attention, both spatially and
temporally, and there is low correlation between caption scores and attention
consistency scores. These indicate a large gap between humans and machines in
regards to top-down attention, and (5) by integrating the soft attention model
with image saliency, we can significantly improve the model's performance on
Flickr30k and MSCOCO benchmarks. The dataset can be found at:
https://github.com/SenHe/Human-Attention-in-Image-Captioning.Comment: To appear at ICCV 201
Why do These Match? Explaining the Behavior of Image Similarity Models
Explaining a deep learning model can help users understand its behavior and
allow researchers to discern its shortcomings. Recent work has primarily
focused on explaining models for tasks like image classification or visual
question answering. In this paper, we introduce Salient Attributes for Network
Explanation (SANE) to explain image similarity models, where a model's output
is a score measuring the similarity of two inputs rather than a classification
score. In this task, an explanation depends on both of the input images, so
standard methods do not apply. Our SANE explanations pairs a saliency map
identifying important image regions with an attribute that best explains the
match. We find that our explanations provide additional information not
typically captured by saliency maps alone, and can also improve performance on
the classic task of attribute recognition. Our approach's ability to generalize
is demonstrated on two datasets from diverse domains, Polyvore Outfits and
Animals with Attributes 2. Code available at:
https://github.com/VisionLearningGroup/SANEComment: Accepted at ECCV 202
Monitoring Processes in Visual Search Enhanced by Professional Experience: The Case of Orange Quality-Control Workers
Visual search tasks have often been used to investigate how cognitive processes change with expertise. Several studies have shown visual experts' advantages in detecting objects related to their expertise. Here, we tried to extend these findings by investigating whether professional search experience could boost top-down monitoring processes involved in visual search, independently of advantages specific to objects of expertise. To this aim, we recruited a group of quality-control workers employed in citrus farms. Given the specific features of this type of job, we expected that the extensive employment of monitoring mechanisms during orange selection could enhance these mechanisms even in search situations in which orange-related expertise is not suitable. To test this hypothesis, we compared performance of our experimental group and of a well-matched control group on a computerized visual search task. In one block the target was an orange (expertise target) while in the other block the target was a Smurfette doll (neutral target). The a priori hypothesis was to find an advantage for quality-controllers in those situations in which monitoring was especially involved, that is, when deciding the presence/absence of the target required a more extensive inspection of the search array. Results were consistent with our hypothesis. Quality-controllers were faster in those conditions that extensively required monitoring processes, specifically, the Smurfette-present and both target-absent conditions. No differences emerged in the orange-present condition, which resulted to mainly rely on bottom-up processes. These results suggest that top-down processes in visual search can be enhanced through immersive real-life experience beyond visual expertise advantages
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