Object and scene analysis by saccadic eye-movements: an investigation with higher-order statistics

Gerhard Krieger, Ingo Rentschler, Gert Hauske, Kerstin Schill, Christoph Zetzsche
2000 Spatial Vision  
Based on an information theoretical approach, we investigate feature selection processes in saccadic object and scene analysis. Saccadic eye movements of human observers are recorded for a variety of natural and arti cial test images. These experimental data are used for a statistical evaluation of the xated image regions. Analysis of second-order statistics indicates that regions with higher spatial variance have a higher probability to be xated, but no signi cant differences beyond these
more » ... nce effects could be found at the level of power spectra. By contrast, an investigation with higher-order statistics, as re ected in the bispectral density, yielded clear structural differences between the image regions selected by saccadic eye movements as opposed to regions selected by a random process. These results indicate that nonredundant, intrinsically two-dimensional image features like curved lines and edges, occlusions, isolated spots, etc. play an important role in the saccadic selection process which must be integrated with top-down knowledge to fully predict object and scene analysis by human observers.
doi:10.1163/156856800741216 pmid:11198232 fatcat:tdw2rvehdfgc5ido3rg2t3c2mu