From Where and How to What We See

Eye movement studies have confirmed that overt attention is highly biased towards faces and text regions in images. In this paper we explore a novel problem of predicting face and text regions in images using eye tracking data from multiple subjects. The problem is challenging as we aim to predict the semantics (face/text/background) only from eye tracking data without utilizing any image information. The proposed algorithm spatially clusters eye tracking data obtained in an image into different coherent groups and subsequently models the likelihood of the clusters containing faces and text using a fully connected Markov Random Field (MRF). Given the eye tracking data from a test image, it predicts potential face/head (humans, dogs and cats) and text locations reliably. Furthermore, the approach can be used to select regions of interest for further analysis by object detectors for faces and text. The hybrid eye position/object detector approach achieves better detection performance and reduced computation time compared to using only the object detection algorithm. We also present a new eye tracking dataset on 300 images selected from ICDAR, Street-view, Flickr and Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset from 15 subjects.