A proto-object based audiovisual saliency map

Abstract: Natural environment and our interaction with it is essentially multisensory, where we may deploy visual, tactile and/or auditory senses to perceive, learn and interact with our environment. Our objective in this study is to develop a scene analysis algorithm using multisensory information, specifically vision and audio. We develop a proto-object based audiovisual saliency map (AVSM) for the analysis of dynamic natural scenes. A specialized audiovisual camera with $360 \degree$ Field of View, capable of locating sound direction, is used to collect spatiotemporally aligned audiovisual data. We demonstrate that the performance of proto-object based audiovisual saliency map in detecting and localizing salient objects/events is in agreement with human judgment. In addition, the proto-object based AVSM that we compute as a linear combination of visual and auditory feature conspicuity maps captures a higher number of valid salient events compared to unisensory saliency maps. Such an algorithm can be useful in surveillance, robotic navigation, video compression and related applications.