Abstract

L. Elazary, L. Itti, Interesting objects are visually salient, Journal of Vision, Vol. 8, No. 3:3, pp. 1-15, Mar 2008. [2006 impact factor: 3.753] (Cited by 363)

Abstract: How do we decide which objects in a visual scene are more interesting? While intuition may point toward high-level object recognition and cognitive processes, here we investigate the contributions of a much simpler process, low-level visual saliency. We used the LabelMe database (24,863 photographs with 74,454 manually outlined objects) to evaluate how often interesting objects were among the few most salient locations predicted by a computational model of bottom-up attention. In 43% of all images the model's predicted most salient location falls within a labeled region (chance 21%). Furthermore, in 76% of the images (chance 43%), one or more of the top three salient locations fell on an outlined object, with performance leveling off after six predicted locations. The bottom-up attention model has neither notion of object nor notion of semantic relevance. Hence, our results indicate that selecting interesting objects in a scene is largely constrained by low-level visual properties rather than solely determined by higher cognitive processes.

Themes: Model of Top-Down Attentional Modulation, Computational Modeling, Computer Vision, Scene Understanding