Features that draw visual attention: an information theoretic perspective

A novel image operator is proposed for the purpose of predicting the focus of visual attention in arbitrary natural scenes based on local statistics. The proposed method is based on the hypothetical premise that attention proceeds by way of sampling a scene in a manner that maximizes the information acquired from the scene. A tractable means of computing the joint likelihood of local statistics in a low-dimensional space is presented and shown to have a close relationship to the representation of retinal image stimulus existing in the primary visual cortex of primates. The proposed image operator is validated through comparison with existing features implicated in the focus of attention in their relative correlation to experimental eye tracking data. (c) 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.