A method to construct an importance map of an image using the saliency map model and eye movement analysis

  • Authors:

  • Akira Egawa;Susumu Shirayama

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Tokyo, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Interpretability and recognizability of images have played important roles in applications such as the analysis of surveillance images, medical image diagnosis, and visual communication in education. In order to make an image as interpretable and recognizable as possible, unimportant visual information is removed or minimized, and regions that are of higher importance than others are clearly identified. Several methods have been developed to identify the important regions in an image. Most of these methods consist of two stages: segmentation of the image and ordering the segments hierarchically according to their relative importance. In the present paper, we propose a new method by which an importance map of a source image can be constructed. First, the source image is divided into segments based on a saliency map model that indicates high-saliency regions. Second, the segments are ordered according to the attention shift induced by the saliency map. Third, eye movement data is acquired and mapped into the segments. A network for the eye movements is generated by regarding the segments as nodes. The importance score can be calculated by the PageRank algorithm. Finally, an importance map of the image is constructed by combining the attention shift among the segments and the scores determined from eye movements. The usefulness of the proposed method is then investigated through several experiments.