Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Top Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search

While seraching for an object in a scene humans make use various sources of information for narrowing down their search to certain areas which are more probable to have that object. Various sources of ”top down” influences have been investigated in the literature including contexual guidance and appearance based influence to attentional guidance. In our work we use both the top down cues to predict eye fixations of humans beings during visual search. We also propose a confidence measure in the context model and weigh down the contexual influence accordingly. A simple object detector with boosting is used to obtain scores for images object based information. The results show that contextual guidance is better at predicting the eye fixations than the object based information and the combination of the influences shows a marginal increase in accuracy.