Visual Saliency Detection With Free Energy Theory

Abstract

Visual saliency can be thought of as the product of human brain activity. Most existing models were built upon local features or global features or both. Lately, a so-called free energy principle unifies several brain theories within one framework, and tells where easily surprise human viewers in a visual stimulus through a psychological measure. We believe that this "surprise" should be highly related to visual saliency, and thereby introduce a novel computational Free Energy inspired Saliency detection technique (FES). Our method computes the local entropy of the gap between an input image signal and its predicted counterpart that is reconstructed from the input one with a semi-parametric model. Experimental results prove that our algorithm predicts human fixation points accurately and is superior to classical/state-of-the-art competitors.