A stochastic model of human visual attention with a dynamic Bayesian network

Abstract: Recent studies in the field of human vision science suggest that the human responses to the stimuli on a visual display are non-deterministic. People may attend to different locations on the same visual input at the same time. Based on this knowledge, we propose a new stochastic model of visual attention by introducing a dynamic Bayesian network to predict the likelihood of where humans typically focus on a video scene. The proposed model is composed of a dynamic Bayesian network with 4 layers. Our model provides a framework that simulates and combines the visual saliency response and the cognitive state of a person to estimate the most probable attended regions. Sample-based inference with Markov chain Monte-Carlo based particle filter and stream processing with multi-core processors enable us to estimate human visual attention in near real time. Experimental results have demonstrated that our model performs significantly better in predicting human visual attention compared to the previous deterministic models.