The human visual system samples images through saccadic eye movements which rapidly change the point of fixation. Although the selection of eye movement targets depends on numerous top-down mechanisms, a number of recent studies have shown that low-level image features such as local contrast or edges play an important role. These studies typically used predefined image features which were afterwards experimentally verified. Here, we follow a complementary approach: instead of testing a set of candidate image features, we infer these hypotheses from the data, using methods from statistical learning. To this end, we train a non-linear classifier on fixated vs. randomly selected image patches without making any physiological assumptions. The resulting classifier can be essentially characterized by a nonlinear combination of two center-surround receptive fields. We find that the prediction performance of this simple model on our eye movement data is indistinguishable from the physiologically motivated model of Itti & Koch (2000) which is far more complex. In particular, we obtain a comparable performance without using any multi-scale representations, long-range interactions or oriented image features.
| Author(s): | Kienzle, W. and Wichmann, FA. and Schölkopf, B. and Franz, MO. |
| Journal: | Sensory Coding And The Natural Environment |
| Volume: | 2006 |
| Pages: | 1 |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Month: | September |
| Day: | 0 |
| Bibtex Type: | Poster (poster) |
| Digital: | 0 |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
| Language: | en |
| Organization: | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft |
| School: | Biologische Kybernetik |
| Links: | |
BibTex
@poster{4154,
title = {Learning Eye Movements},
journal = {Sensory Coding And The Natural Environment},
abstract = {The human visual system samples images through saccadic eye movements which rapidly change the point of fixation. Although the selection of eye movement targets depends on numerous top-down mechanisms, a number of recent studies have shown that low-level image features such as local contrast or edges play an important role. These studies typically used predefined image features which were afterwards experimentally verified.
Here, we follow a complementary approach: instead of testing a set of candidate image features, we infer these hypotheses from the data, using methods from statistical learning. To this end, we train a non-linear classifier on fixated vs. randomly selected image patches without making any physiological assumptions. The resulting classifier can be essentially characterized by a nonlinear combination of two center-surround receptive fields. We find that the prediction performance of this simple model on our eye movement data is indistinguishable from the physiologically motivated model of Itti & Koch (2000) which is far more complex. In particular, we obtain a comparable performance without using any multi-scale representations, long-range interactions or oriented image features.},
volume = {2006},
pages = {1},
organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
month = sep,
year = {2006},
slug = {4154},
author = {Kienzle, W. and Wichmann, FA. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B. and Franz, MO.},
month_numeric = {9}
}