Tech Report: Eye movements - a computational study

[Rajesh Rao]

The following report describing a computational model of eye movements
in visual cognition is available for retrieval via ftp.

Keywords: Saccades, spatiochromatic filters, saliency maps, spatial
          memory, object-centered maps, reference frames

Comments and suggestions welcome (This message has been cross-posted -
my apologies to those who received it more than once).

-- 
Rajesh Rao                       Internet: rao at cs.rochester.edu
Dept. of Computer Science        VOX:  (716) 275-2527              
University of Rochester          FAX:  (716) 461-2018
Rochester  NY  14627-0226        WWW:  http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/rao/

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		   Eye Movements in Visual Cognition:
			  A Computational Study

                   Rajesh P.N. Rao, Gregory J. Zelinsky,
                    Mary M. Hayhoe, and Dana H. Ballard

			 Technical Report 97.1
  National Resource Laboratory for the Study of Brain and Behavior
			University of Rochester
			     March 1997

     

			      Abstract  
                  
  Visual cognition depends critically on the moment-to-moment
  orientation of gaze. Gaze is changed by saccades, rapid eye
  movements that orient the fovea over targets of interest in a visual
  scene.  Saccades are ballistic; a prespecified target location is
  computed prior to the movement and visual feedback is precluded.
  Once a target is fixated, gaze is typically held for about 300
  milliseconds, although it can be held for both longer and shorter
  intervals. Despite these distinctive properties, there has been no
  specific computational model of the gaze targeting strategy employed
  by the human visual system during visual cognitive tasks.  This
  paper proposes such a model that uses iconic scene representations
  derived from oriented spatiochromatic filters at multiple
  scales. Visual search for a target object proceeds in a
  coarse-to-fine fashion with the target's largest scale filter
  responses being compared first. Task-relevant target locations are
  represented as saliency maps which are used to program eye
  movements. Once fixated, targets are remembered by using spatial
  memory in the form of object-centered maps.  The model was
  empirically tested by comparing its performance with actual eye
  movement data from human subjects in natural visual search tasks.
  Experimental results indicate excellent agreement between eye
  movements predicted by the model and those recorded from human
  subjects.




Retrieval information:

FTP-host:       ftp.cs.rochester.edu
FTP-pathname:   /pub/u/rao/papers/tr97.1.ps.Z
URL:            ftp://ftp.cs.rochester.edu/pub/u/rao/papers/tr97.1.ps.Z

35 pages; 1385K compressed, 6667K uncompressed
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Anonymous ftp instructions:

>ftp ftp.cs.rochester.edu
Connected to anon.cs.rochester.edu.
220 anon.cs.rochester.edu FTP server (Version wu-2.4(3)) ready.

Name: [type 'anonymous' here]
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.

Password: [type your e-mail address here]

ftp> cd /pub/u/rao/papers/
ftp> get tr97.1.ps.Z
ftp> bye
>uncompress tr97.1.ps.Z
>lpr tr97.1.ps