Predicting Eye Fixations Under Distortion Using Bayesian Observers

Visual attention is very an essential factor that affects how human perceives visual signals. This report investigates how distortions in an image could distract human's visual attention using Bayesian visual search models, specifically, Maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) citefindlay1982globalciteeckstein2001quantifying and Entropy Limit Minimization (ELM) citenajemnik2009simple, which predict eye fixation movements based on a Bayesian probabilistic framework. Experiments on modified MAP and ELM models on JPEG-compressed images containing blocking or ringing artifacts were conducted and we observed that compression artifacts can affect visual attention. We hope this work sheds light on the interactions between visual attention and perceptual quality.