text: Data-driven saliency has recently gained a lot of attention thanks to the use of convolutional neural networks for predicting gaze fixations. In this paper, we go beyond standard approaches to saliency prediction, in which gaze maps are computed with a feed-forward network, and present a novel model which can predict accurate saliency maps by incorporating neural attentive mechanisms. The core of our solution is a convolutional long short-term memory that focuses on the most salient regions of the input image to iteratively refine the predicted saliency map. In addition, to tackle the center bias typical of human eye fixations, our model can learn a set of prior maps generated with Gaussian functions. We show, through an extensive evaluation, that the proposed architecture outperforms the current state-of-the-art on public saliency prediction datasets. We further study the contribution of each key component to demonstrate their robustness on different scenarios.
  @cite_58: Understanding and predicting the human visual attention mechanism is an active area of research in the fields of neuroscience and computer vision. In this paper, we propose DeepFix, a fully convolutional neural network, which models the bottom–up mechanism of visual attention via saliency prediction. Unlike classical works, which characterize the saliency map using various hand-crafted features, our model automatically learns features in a hierarchical fashion and predicts the saliency map in an end-to-end manner. DeepFix is designed to capture semantics at multiple scales while taking global context into account, by using network layers with very large receptive fields. Generally, fully convolutional nets are spatially invariant—this prevents them from modeling location-dependent patterns (e.g., centre-bias). Our network handles this by incorporating a novel location-biased convolutional layer. We evaluate our model on multiple challenging saliency data sets and show that it achieves the state-of-the-art results.
  @cite_63: This paper presents a novel deep architecture for saliency prediction. Current state of the art models for saliency prediction employ Fully Convolutional networks that perform a non-linear combination of features extracted from the last convolutional layer to predict saliency maps. We propose an architecture which, instead, combines features extracted at different levels of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our model is composed of three main blocks: a feature extraction CNN, a feature encoding network, that weights low and high level feature maps, and a prior learning network. We compare our solution with state of the art saliency models on two public benchmarks datasets. Results show that our model outperforms under all evaluation metrics on the SALICON dataset, which is currently the largest public dataset for saliency prediction, and achieves competitive results on the MIT300 benchmark.
summary: In this work, instead, we model the center bias present in human gazes using multiple learned prior maps. This is different from the approaches of @cite_63 and @cite_58 , as we let the network learn a set of Gaussian parameters, keeping it trainable end-to-end without predefined information.