Visual attention analysis by pseudo gravitational field

As a crucial step of the visual cognition and perception, visual attention analysis shows great importance in many research or application areas. In this paper, we treat this problem from a new angle, inspired by the classic gravitational field theory. By defining "mass" of each pixel, we compute "force" between them to obtain a so-called pseudo gravitational field over an image. Then, we propose an iteration algorithm to simulate the movement of the fixation points affected by this field. Finally, stable visual attention points or areas are obtained when those fixation points finally aggregate around some special pixels or areas. The main contributions are threefold: (1) by introducing classic gravitational field theory into visual attention analysis, a new point of view is proposed; (2) a competition scheme is constructed and the meaning of attraction can be applied into visual attention analysis intuitively; (3) by using pixels into computation through down sampling, a faster analysis method is achieved. The experimental result shows that our method is effective and consistent with the generally accepted definition of visual attention.