Saliency prediction for visual regions of interest with applications in advertising

Abstract

Human visual fixations play a vital role in a plethora of genres, ranging from advertising design to human-computer interaction. Considering saliency in images thus brings significant merits to Computer Vision tasks dealing with human perception. Several classification models have been developed to incorporate various feature levels and estimate free eye-gazes. However, for real-time applications (Here, real-time applications refer to those that are time, and often resource-constrained, requiring speedy results. It does not imply on-line data analysis), the deep convolution neural networks are either difficult to deploy, given current hardware limitations or the proposed classifiers cannot effectively combine image semantics with low-level attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network approach to predict human fixations, specifically aimed at advertisements. Such analysis significantly impacts the brand value and assists in audience measurement. A dataset containing 400 print ads across 21 successful brands was used to successfully evaluate the effectiveness of advertisements and their associated fixations, based on the proposed saliency prediction model. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.