An Integrated Approach to Visual Attention Modeling for Saliency Detection in Videos

In this chapter, we present a framework to learn and predict regions of interest in videos, based on human eye movements. In our approach, the eye gaze information of several users are recorded as they watch videos that are similar, and belong to a particular application domain. This information is used to train a classifier to learn low-level video features from regions that attracted the visual attention of users. Such a classifier is combined with vision-based approaches to provide an integrated framework to detect salient regions in videos. Till date, saliency prediction has been viewed from two different perspectives, namely visual attention modeling and spatiotemporal interest point detection. These approaches have largely been vision-based. They detect regions having a predefined set of characteristics such as complex motion or high contrast, for all kinds of videos. However, what is ‘interesting’ varies from one application to another. By learning features of regions that capture the attention of viewers while watching a video, we aim to distinguish those that are actually salient in the given context, from the rest. The integrated approach ensures that both regions with anticipated content (top–down attention) and unanticipated content (bottom–up attention) are predicted by the proposed framework as salient. In our experiments with news videos of popular channels, the results show a significant improvement in the identification of relevant salient regions in such videos, when compared with existing approaches.