A Comparison Study of Saliency Models for Fixation Prediction on Infants and Adults

Various saliency models have been developed over the years. The performance of saliency models is typically evaluated based on databases of experimentally recorded adult eye fixations. Although studies on infant gaze patterns have attracted much attention recently, saliency-based models have not been widely applied for prediction of infant gaze patterns. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive comparison study of eight state-of-the-art saliency models on predictions of experimentally captured fixations from infants and adults. Seven evaluation metrics are used to evaluate and compare the performance of saliency models. The results demonstrate a consistent performance of saliency models predicting adult fixations over infant fixations in terms of overlap, center fitting, intersection, information loss of approximation, and spatial distance between the distributions of saliency map and fixation map. In saliency and baselines models performance ranking, the results show that graph-based visual saliency model and Itti model are among the top three contenders, infants and adults have bias toward the centers of images, and all models and the center baseline model outperformed the chance baseline model.