The influence of stereopsis on visual saliency in a proto-object based model of selective attention

Takeshi Uejima; Elena Mancinelli; Ernst Niebur; Ralph Etienne-Cummings

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2023.108304

The influence of stereopsis on visual saliency in a proto-object based model of selective attention

Vision Res. 2023 Nov:212:108304. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2023.108304. Epub 2023 Aug 3.

Authors

Takeshi Uejima¹, Elena Mancinelli², Ernst Niebur³, Ralph Etienne-Cummings²

Affiliations

¹ The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. Electronic address: tuejima1@alumni.jh.edu.
² The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
³ The Solomon Snyder Department of Neuroscience and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

PMID: 37542763
PMCID: PMC10592191 (available on 2024-11-01)
DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2023.108304

Abstract

Some animals including humans use stereoscopic vision which reconstructs spatial information about the environment from the disparity between images captured by eyes in two separate adjacent locations. Like other sensory information, such stereoscopic information is expected to influence attentional selection. We develop a biologically plausible model of binocular vision to study its effect on bottom-up visual attention, i.e., visual saliency. In our model, the scene is organized in terms of proto-objects on which attention acts, rather than on unbound sets of elementary features. We show that taking into account the stereoscopic information improves the performance of the model in the prediction of human eye movements with statistically significant differences.

Keywords: Disparity; Eye fixation; Proto-object; Saliency; Stereopsis; Visual attention.

Abstract

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