Contextual guidance of eye movements and attention in real-world scenes: the role of global features in object search.
Psychological Review, 113, 766-786.
Torralba, A., Oliva, A., Castelhano, M., & Henderson, J.M. (2006).
Many experiments have shown that the human visual system makes extensive use of contextual information for facilitating object search in natural scenes. However, the question of how to formally model contextual influences is still open. Based on a Bayesian framework, we present an original approach of attentional guidance by global scene context. Two parallel pathways comprise the model; one pathway computes local features (saliency) and the other computes global (scene-centered) features. The Contextual Guidance model of attention combines bottom-up saliency, scene context and top-down mechanisms at an early stage of visual processing, and predicts the image regions likely to be fixated by human observers performing natural search tasks in real world scenes.