Visual Attention Saccadic Models Learn to Emulate Gaze Patterns From Childhood to Adulthood

International audienceHow people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models aim to predict not only where observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. In this paper, we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate observer's viewing tendencies. More specifically, we use fixation data from 101 observers split into 5 age groups (adults, 8-10 y.o., 6-8 y.o., 4-6 y.o. and 2 y.o.) to train our saccadic model for different stages of the development of human visual system. We show that the joint distribution of saccade amplitude and orientation is a visual signature specific to each age group, and can be used to generate age-dependent scanpaths. Our age-dependent saccadic model does not only output human-like, age-specific visual scanpaths, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models. We demonstrate that the computational modelling of visual attention, through the use of saccadic model, can be efficiently adapted to emulate the gaze behavior of a specific group of observers