Attentional Push: A Deep Convolutional Network for Augmenting Image Salience With Shared Attention Modeling in Social Scenes

Siavash Gorji, James J. Clark; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 2510-2519

We present a novel visual attention tracking technique based on Shared Attention modeling. By considering the viewer as a participant in the activity occurring in the scene, our model learns the loci of attention of the scene actors and use it to augment image salience. We go beyond image salience and instead of only computing the power of image regions to pull attention, we also consider the strength with which the scene actors push attention to the region in question, thus the term Attentional Push. We present a convolutional neural network (CNN) which augments standard saliency models with Attentional Push. Our model contains two pathways: an Attentional Push pathway which learns the gaze location of the scene actors and a saliency pathway. These are followed by a shallow augmented saliency CNN which combines them and generates the augmented saliency. For training, we use transfer learning to initialize and train the Attentional Push CNN by minimizing the classification error of following the actors' gaze location on a 2-D grid using a large-scale gaze-following dataset. The Attentional Push CNN is then fine-tuned along with the augmented saliency CNN to minimize the Euclidean distance between the augmented saliency and ground truth fixations using an eye-tracking dataset, annotated with the head and the gaze location of the scene actors. We evaluate our model on three challenging eye fixation datasets, SALICON, iSUN and CAT2000, and illustrate significant improvements in predicting viewers' fixations in social scenes.