A semiautomatic saliency model and its application to video compression

This work aims to apply visual-attention modeling to attention-based video compression. During our comparison we found that eye-tracking data collected even from a single observer outperforms existing automatic models by a significant margin. Therefore, we offer a semiautomatic approach: using computer-vision algorithms and good initial estimation of eye-tracking data from just one observer to produce high-quality saliency maps that are similar to multi-observer eye tracking and that are appropriate for practical applications. We propose a simple algorithm that is based on temporal coherence of the visual-attention distribution and requires eye tracking of just one observer. The results are as good as an average gaze map for two observers. While preparing the saliency-model comparison, we paid special attention to the quality-measurement procedure. We observe that many modern visual-attention models can be improved by applying simple transforms such as brightness adjustment and blending with the center-prior model. The novel quality-evaluation procedure that we propose is invariant to such transforms. To show the practical use of our semiautomatic approach, we developed a saliency-aware modification of the x264 video encoder and performed subjective and objective evaluations. The modified encoder can serve with any attention model and is publicly available.