Selective Visual Attention: Computational Models and Applications

6.1 Simple Man-made Visual Patterns

Simple visual patterns can be made and adopted in various visual attention experiments to explore the visual attention phenomena or validate visual attention models [3, 4, 12, 14]. Studies show that locations with different low-level salient features from surroundings can be detected rapidly and accurately [12, 13]. Normally, a simple visual pattern includes one single target with an obviously different low-level feature (such as colour, intensity, orientation, shape or density) from others in the same visual scene. These patterns often come from psychophysical experiments. Figure 1.4 has already included several examples of man-made visual patterns. Figure 6.1 shows three further such sample patterns [14] and the associated saliency maps [4]. In Figure 6.1(a), the first sample pattern shows one vertical bar among many largely horizontal ones; the target of the second pattern is one circular object surrounded by horizontal bars; and the third sample pattern is formed by one denser cluster of horizontal bars with other bars. As we know, humans will definitely focus on the vertical target, the circular target and the dense cluster in these three patterns, respectively.

Figure 6.1 Simple visual patterns and their saliency maps. (a) Reproduced with permission from Christopher G. Healey, ‘Perception in Visualization’, North Carolina State University, http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/PP/index.html (accessed 1 October 2012). (b) © 2008 IEEE. ...