Measuring the Visual Salience of 3D Printed Objects

Abstract

To investigate human viewing behavior on physical realizations of 3D objects, the authors use an eye tracker with scene camera and fiducial markers on 3D objects to gather fixations on the presented stimuli. They use this data to validate assumptions regarding visual saliency that so far have experimentally only been analyzed for flat stimuli. They provide a way to compare fixation sequences from different subjects and developed a model for generating test sequences of fixations unrelated to the stimuli. Their results suggest that human observers agree in their fixations for the same object under similar viewing conditions. They also developed a simple procedure to validate computational models for visual saliency of 3D objects and found that popular models of mesh saliency based on center surround patterns fail to predict fixations.