Visual selective attention model considering bottom-up saliency and psychological distance

Abstract

Congruency or incongruency between a psychological distance and a spatial distance for given visual stimuli can affect reaction time to corresponding visual stimuli in the course of visual perception. Human reacts more rapidly for congruent stimuli than incongruent one. More rapid reaction to visual stimuli is related with higher selectivity property in terms of visual selective attention. Based on this psychological evidence, we propose a new visual selective attention model reflecting the congruency or incongruency between a psychological distance and a spatial distance of visual stimuli as well as bottom-up saliency generated by spatial relativity of primitive visual features. The proposed visual selective attention model can generate more human like visual scan path by considering a psychological factor, which can focus on congruent visual stimuli with higher priority than incongruent one. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.