On the use of gaze information and saliency maps for measuring perceptual contrast

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach for measuring perceived contrast. The proposed method comes from the modification of previous algorithms with a different local measure of contrast and with a parameterized way to recombine local contrast maps and color channels. We propose the idea of recombining the local contrast maps using gaze information, saliency maps and a gaze-attentive fixation finding engine as weighting parameters giving attention to regions that observers stare at, finding them important. Our experimental results show that contrast measures cannot be improved using different weighting maps as contrast is an intrinsic factor and it's judged by the global impression of the image. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.