SmartOverlays: A Visual Saliency Driven Label Placement for Intelligent Human-Computer Interfaces

In augmented reality (AR), the computer generated labels assist in understanding a scene by addition of contextual information. However, naive label placement often results in clutter and occlusion impairing the effectiveness of AR visualization. For label placement, the main objectives to be satisfied are, non-occlusion to the scene of interest, the proximity of labels to the object, and, temporally coherent labels in a video/live feed. We present a novel method for the placement of labels corresponding to objects of interest in a video/live feed that satisfies the aforementioned objectives. Our proposed framework, SmartOverlays, first identifies the objects and generates corresponding labels using a YOLOv2 [28] in a video frame; at the same time, Saliency Attention Model (SAM) [7] learns eye fixation points that aid in predicting saliency maps; finally, computes Voronoi partitions of the video frame, choosing the centroids of objects as seed points, to place labels for satisfying the proximity constraints with the object of interest. In addition, our approach incorporates tracking the detected objects in a frame to facilitate temporal coherence between frames that enhances the readability of labels. We measure the effectiveness of SmartOverlays framework using three objective metrics: (a) Label Occlusion over Saliency (LOS), (b) temporal jitter metric to quantify jitter in the label placement, (c) computation time for label placement.