Image features that draw fixations

The ability to automatically detect 'visually interesting' regions in an image has many practical applications especially in the design of active machine vision systems. This paper describes a data-driven approach that uses eye tracking in tandem with principal component analysis to extract low-level image features that attract human gaze. Data analysis on an ensemble of image patches extracted at the observer's point of gaze revealed features that resemble derivatives of the 2D Gaussian operator. Dissimilarities between human and random fixations are investigated by comparing the features extracted at the point of gaze to the general image structure obtained by random sampling in Monte-Carlo simulations. Finally, a simple application where these features are used to predict fixations is illustrated.