The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation

In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of fixation prediction and salient object segmentation algorithms as well as statistics of major datasets. Our analysis identifies serious design flaws of existing salient object benchmarks, called the dataset design bias, by over emphasizing the stereotypical concepts of saliency. The dataset design bias does not only create the discomforting disconnection between fixations and salient object segmentation, but also misleads the algorithm designing. Based on our analysis, we propose a new high quality dataset that offers both fixation and salient object segmentation ground-truth. With fixations and salient object being presented simultaneously, we are able to bridge the gap between fixations and salient objects, and propose a novel method for salient object segmentation. Finally, we report significant benchmark progress on three existing datasets of segmenting salient objectsComment: 15 pages, 8 figures. Conference version was accepted by CVPR 201

Are all the frames equally important?

In this work, we address the problem of measuring and predicting temporal video saliency - a metric which defines the importance of a video frame for human attention. Unlike the conventional spatial saliency which defines the location of the salient regions within a frame (as it is done for still images), temporal saliency considers importance of a frame as a whole and may not exist apart from context. The proposed interface is an interactive cursor-based algorithm for collecting experimental data about temporal saliency. We collect the first human responses and perform their analysis. As a result, we show that qualitatively, the produced scores have very explicit meaning of the semantic changes in a frame, while quantitatively being highly correlated between all the observers. Apart from that, we show that the proposed tool can simultaneously collect fixations similar to the ones produced by eye-tracker in a more affordable way. Further, this approach may be used for creation of first temporal saliency datasets which will allow training computational predictive algorithms. The proposed interface does not rely on any special equipment, which allows to run it remotely and cover a wide audience.Comment: CHI'20 Late Breaking Work

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

Saliency Prediction for Mobile User Interfaces

We introduce models for saliency prediction for mobile user interfaces. A mobile interface may include elements like buttons, text, etc. in addition to natural images which enable performing a variety of tasks. Saliency in natural images is a well studied area. However, given the difference in what constitutes a mobile interface, and the usage context of these devices, we postulate that saliency prediction for mobile interface images requires a fresh approach. Mobile interface design involves operating on elements, the building blocks of the interface. We first collected eye-gaze data from mobile devices for free viewing task. Using this data, we develop a novel autoencoder based multi-scale deep learning model that provides saliency prediction at the mobile interface element level. Compared to saliency prediction approaches developed for natural images, we show that our approach performs significantly better on a range of established metrics.Comment: Paper accepted at WACV 201