Visual Attention Saccadic Models Learn to Emulate Gaze Patterns From Childhood to Adulthood

International audienceHow people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models aim to predict not only where observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. In this paper, we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate observer's viewing tendencies. More specifically, we use fixation data from 101 observers split into 5 age groups (adults, 8-10 y.o., 6-8 y.o., 4-6 y.o. and 2 y.o.) to train our saccadic model for different stages of the development of human visual system. We show that the joint distribution of saccade amplitude and orientation is a visual signature specific to each age group, and can be used to generate age-dependent scanpaths. Our age-dependent saccadic model does not only output human-like, age-specific visual scanpaths, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models. We demonstrate that the computational modelling of visual attention, through the use of saccadic model, can be efficiently adapted to emulate the gaze behavior of a specific group of observers

Looking (for) patterns: Similarities and differences between infant and adult free scene-viewing patterns

Systematic tendencies such as the center and horizontal bias are known to have a large influence on how and where we move our eyes during static onscreen free scene viewing. However, it is unknown whether these tendencies are learned viewing strategies or are more default tendencies in the way we move our eyes. To gain insight into the origin of these tendencies we explore the systematic tendencies of infants (3 - 20-month-olds, N = 157) and adults (N = 88) in three different scene viewing data sets. We replicated common findings, such as longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes in infants compared to adults. The leftward bias was never studied in infants, and our results indicate that it is not present, while we did replicate the leftward bias in adults. The general pattern of the results highlights the similarity between infant and adult eye movements. Similar to adults, infants’ fixation durations increase with viewing time and the dependencies between successive fixations and saccades show very similar patterns. A straightforward conclusion to draw from this set of studies is that infant and adult eye movements are mainly driven by similar underlying basic processes

Few-shot Personalized Saliency Prediction Based on Inter-personnel Gaze Patterns

This paper presents few-shot personalized saliency prediction based on inter-personnel gaze patterns. In contrast to a general saliency map, a personalized saliecny map (PSM) has been great potential since its map indicates the person-specific visual attention that is useful for obtaining individual visual preferences from heterogeneity of gazed areas. The PSM prediction is needed for acquiring the PSM for the unseen image, but its prediction is still a challenging task due to the complexity of individual gaze patterns. For modeling individual gaze patterns for various images, although the eye-tracking data obtained from each person is necessary to construct PSMs, it is difficult to acquire the massive amounts of such data. Here, one solution for efficient PSM prediction from the limited amount of data can be the effective use of eye-tracking data obtained from other persons. In this paper, to effectively treat the PSMs of other persons, we focus on the effective selection of images to acquire eye-tracking data and the preservation of structural information of PSMs of other persons. In the experimental results, we confirm that the above two focuses are effective for the PSM prediction with the limited amount of eye-tracking data.Comment: 5pages, 3 figure

Studying the gaze patterns of expert radiologists in screening mammography: a case study with Breast Test Wales

Eye-tracking technology has become a widely used means to understand how radiologists perceive and interpret medical images, providing useful information that can help improve diagnostic accuracy. However, existing eyetracking studies in medical imaging remain limited due to the small number of stimuli and/or of subjects involved, and the lack of quantitative metrics to fully reveal readers’ gaze behaviour. In this paper, we present the conduct of a larger scale eyetracking study, where seven expert radiologists were asked to read 196 mammogram images. Furthermore, we carry out an analyse various gaze metrics including fixation duration, saccade amplitude, as well as gaze deployment, which quantify radiologists’ gaze behaviour

The assessment of visual behaviour and depth perception in surgery

Imperial Users onl

The remediation of oculomotor and attentional deficits of children with ADHD: identifying and training control mechanisms based on ocular data

This project set out to develop a cognitive training intervention for individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The thesis builds on research suggesting that reinforcement deficits in the ADHD population give rise to the underdevelopment of a number of cognitive abilities, in particular inhibitory control skills. Arguing that this skill is explicitly trainable and that training inhibitory gaze control is a means of training inhibitory control, this thesis set out to utilise eye-tracking technology to assess inhibitory gaze control performance in ADHD and to develop an engaging intervention in the form of a computer game capable of training the inhibitory gaze control system. Drawing on literature on inhibitory control in ADHD, the saccadic system, game development, and cognitive load theory a training intervention and battery of assessment tasks were developed iteratively across a number of pilot studies. The development process and resultant cognitive training interventions are described. The final proof-of-concept study was trialled for eight one-hour training sessions with an ADHD population (N = 8). Comparisons of pre- and post-training assessments produced strong effects for measures of gaze control, inhibitory control, timing, and attention. The results are interpreted and a number of limitations noted. The potential benefits of such interventions to aid clinicians to diagnose, to monitor, and to treat ADHD are considered. The relevance of cognitive interventions in contributing to research attempting to identify endophenotypes of ADHD is also discussed

Analysing and quantifying visual experience in medical imaging

Healthcare professionals increasingly view medical images and videos in a variety of environments. The perception and interpretation of medical visual information across all specialties, career stages, and practice settings are critical to patient care and safety. However, medical images and videos are not self-explanatory and thus need to be interpreted by humans, who are prone to errors caused by the inherent limitations of the human visual system. It is essential to understand how medical experts perceive visual content, and use this knowledge to develop new solutions to improve clinical practice. Progress has been made in the literature towards such understanding, however studies remain limited. This thesis investigates two aspects of human visual experience in medical imaging, i.e., visual quality assessment and visual attention. Visual quality assessment is important as diverse visual signal distortion may arise in medical imaging and affect the perceptual quality of visual content, and therefore potentially impact the diagnosis accuracy. We adapted existing qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the quality of distorted medical videos. We also analysed the impact of medical specialty on visual perception and found significant differences between specialty groups, e.g., sonographers were in general more bothered by visual distortions than radiologists. Visual attention has been studied in medical imaging using eye-tracking technology. In this thesis, we firstly investigated gaze allocation with radiologists analysing two-view mammograms and secondly assessed the impact of expertise and experience on gaze behaviour. We also evaluated to what extent state-of-the-art visual attention models can predict radiologists’ gaze behaviour and showed the limitations of existing models. This thesis provides new experimental designs and statistical processes to evaluate the perception of medical images and videos, which can be used to optimise the visual experience of image readers in clinical practice