Predicting image influence on visual saliency distribution: the focal and ambient dichotomy

International audienceThe computational modelling of visual attention relies entirely on visual fixations that are collected during eye-tracking experiments. Although all fixations are assumed to follow the same attention paradigm, some studies suggest the existence of two visual processing modes, called ambient and focal. In this paper, we present the high discrepancy between focal and ambient saliency maps and propose an automatic method for inferring the degree of focalness of an image. This method opens new avenues for the computational modelling of saliency models and their benchmarking