Visual attention is commonly modelled by attempting to characterise objects using features that make them special or in some way distinctive in a scene. These approaches have the disadvantage that it is never certain what features will be relevant in an object that has not been seen before. This paper provides a brief outline of the approaches to modeling human visual attention together with some of the problems that they face. A graphical representation for image similarity is described that relies on the size of maximally associative structures (cliques) that are found to be reflected in pairs of images. While comparing an image with itself, the similarity mechanism is shown to model pop-out effects when constraints are placed on the physical separation of pixels that correspond to nodes in the maximal cliques. Background regions are found to contain structure in common that is not present in the salient regions which are thereby identified by its absence. The approach is illustrated with figures that exemplify asymmetry in pop-out, the conjunction of features, orientation disturbances and the application to natural images.

Date Published: 14 March 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8651, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVIII, 86510V (14 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2002085

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8651:
Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVIII
Bernice E. Rogowitz; Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas; Huib de Ridder, Editor(s)