Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning

It is widely agreed that efficient visual search requires the integration of target-driven top-down information and image-driven bottom-up information. Yet the problem of gaze planning - that is, selecting the next best gaze location given the current observations - remains largely unsolved. We prop...

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Main Authors: Vogel, J, de Freitas, N
Format: Conference item
Published: 2008
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author Vogel, J
de Freitas, N
author_facet Vogel, J
de Freitas, N
author_sort Vogel, J
collection OXFORD
description It is widely agreed that efficient visual search requires the integration of target-driven top-down information and image-driven bottom-up information. Yet the problem of gaze planning - that is, selecting the next best gaze location given the current observations - remains largely unsolved. We propose a probabilistic system that models the gaze sequence as a finite-horizon Bayesian sequential decision process. Direct policy search is used to reason about the next best gaze locations. The system integrates bottom-up saliency information, top-down target knowledge and additional context information through principled Bayesian priors. This results in proposal gaze locations that depend not only the featural visual saliency, but also on prior knowledge and the spatial likelihood of locating the target. The system has been implemented using state-of- the-art object detectors and evaluated on a real-world dataset by comparing it to gaze sequences proposed by a pure bottom-up saliency-based process and to an object detection approach that analyzes the full image. The target-directed attention system is shown to result in higher object detection precision than both competitors, to attend to more relevant targets than the bottom-up attention system, and to require significantly less computation time than the exhaustive approach.
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spelling oxford-uuid:991a4a91-6b76-4a9b-bc2a-41aeeefb7e4d2022-03-27T00:11:43ZTarget−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planningConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:991a4a91-6b76-4a9b-bc2a-41aeeefb7e4dDepartment of Computer Science2008Vogel, Jde Freitas, NIt is widely agreed that efficient visual search requires the integration of target-driven top-down information and image-driven bottom-up information. Yet the problem of gaze planning - that is, selecting the next best gaze location given the current observations - remains largely unsolved. We propose a probabilistic system that models the gaze sequence as a finite-horizon Bayesian sequential decision process. Direct policy search is used to reason about the next best gaze locations. The system integrates bottom-up saliency information, top-down target knowledge and additional context information through principled Bayesian priors. This results in proposal gaze locations that depend not only the featural visual saliency, but also on prior knowledge and the spatial likelihood of locating the target. The system has been implemented using state-of- the-art object detectors and evaluated on a real-world dataset by comparing it to gaze sequences proposed by a pure bottom-up saliency-based process and to an object detection approach that analyzes the full image. The target-directed attention system is shown to result in higher object detection precision than both competitors, to attend to more relevant targets than the bottom-up attention system, and to require significantly less computation time than the exhaustive approach.
spellingShingle Vogel, J
de Freitas, N
Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title_full Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title_fullStr Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title_full_unstemmed Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title_short Target−directed attention: Sequential decision−making for gaze planning
title_sort target directed attention sequential decision making for gaze planning
work_keys_str_mv AT vogelj targetdirectedattentionsequentialdecisionmakingforgazeplanning
AT defreitasn targetdirectedattentionsequentialdecisionmakingforgazeplanning