Visual Interestingness in Webcam-Streams

Interestingness1 is said to be the power of attracting or holding one’s attention because something is unusual or ex-citing. We, as humans, have the great capacity to direct our visual attention and judge the interestingness of a scene. Consider for example the image sequence in the figure on the right. The spider in front of the camera or the snow on the lens are examples of events that deviate from the context since they violate the expectations, and therefore are con-sidered interesting. On the other hand, weather changes or a camera shift, does not considerably raise human atten-tion, even though large regions of the image are influenced. In this work we firstly review related work from psycholog-ical, cognitive and computational perspective. Secondly, we investigate what humans consider as “interesting ” in image sequences and aggregated the results to a human-consensus-baseline. 1