# OpenSAL360: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Platform for Omnidirectional Video Saliency Collection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21480/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03605/) (2016)
- [Cube Padding for Weakly-Supervised Saliency Prediction in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01320/) (2018)
- [ViNet: Pushing the limits of Visual Modality for Audio-Visual Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06170/) (2020)
- [Bridge the Gap Between VQA and Human Behavior on Omnidirectional Video: A Large-Scale Dataset and a Deep Learning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10990/) (2018)
- [ATSal: An Attention Based Architecture for Saliency Prediction in 360 Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10600/) (2020)
- [Panoramic Vision Transformer for Saliency Detection in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08956/) (2022)
- [Saliency Revisited: Analysis of Mouse Movements versus Fixations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10546/) (2017)
- [SalFoM: Dynamic Saliency Prediction with Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03097/) (2024)
- [A Ground-Truth Data Set and a Classification Algorithm for Eye Movements in 360-degree Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06474/) (2019)
- [Panonut360: A Head and Eye Tracking Dataset for Panoramic Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17708/) (2024)
- [Predicting video saliency using crowdsourced mouse-tracking data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00480/) (2019)
- [Saliency-aware End-to-end Learned Variable-Bitrate 360-degree Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08862/) (2024)
- [Penetration Vision through Virtual Reality Headsets: Identifying 360-degree Videos from Head Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11446/) (2024)
- [VATP360: Viewport Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming based on Tile Priority](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15984/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Omnidirectional video saliency prediction plays an important role in many immersive multimedia applications, including viewport-adaptive streaming and compression, foveated rendering, mesh simplification, perceptual quality assessment. Yet progress in this area remains constrained by the cost and complexity of collecting eye-tracking data with VR headsets, which makes large-scale dataset creation difficult to extend. We present OpenSAL360, the first open-source platform for scalable, low-cost 360deg video saliency collection. Unlike conventional VR-based protocols, it requires only a standard screen, mouse, and internet connection, enabling parallel saliency data collection from common crowdsourcing assessors without specialized hardware. We validate our collection protocol against seven well-established VR eye-tracking datasets and conduct ablation studies on key interface, pre-, and post-processing parameters. To demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methodology, we collect and publicly release a saliency dataset covering 500 omnidirectional videos annotated by 2,000+ crowdsourcing assessors, making it, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dataset in this field. We make OpenSAL360 publicly available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/OpenSAL360.