Using the eyes to encode and recognize social scenes

ABSTRACT

In a previous study, we found that observers look mostly at the eyes when viewing natural scenes containing one or more people (Birmingham et al. submitted). This prioritization of eye regions occurred regardless of the type of scene being viewed (e.g. scenes with one person vs. scenes with several people, see Figure 1). The finding that observers attend preferentially to the eyes when freely viewing scenes suggests that they are the most informative regions of the scene. As a consequence, one might also expect that observers encode and/or recognize scenes through information from the eyes. This prediction is in line with the finding that when viewing object scenes in preparation for a later memory test, observers tend to fixate more informative objects more frequently than less informative objects (Henderson et al. 1999).

REFERENCES

• 1: Birmingham, E., Bischof, W. F., Yanko, M., and Kingstone, A. (submitted). Attention within social scenes.
• 2: Henderson, J. M, Weeks, P. A., and Hollingworth, A. 1999. The effects of semantic consistency on eye movements during complex scene viewing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25(1), 210--228.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
      I.4.8 Scene Analysis

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding
  I.5 PATTERN RECOGNITION
      I.5.4 Applications
          Subjects: Computer vision

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design