What Makes a Beautiful Landscape Beautiful: Adjective Noun Pairs Attention by Eye-Tracking and Gaze Analysis

Abstract

This paper asks the questions: what makes a beautiful landscape beautiful, what makes a damaged building look damaged? It tackles the challenge to understand which regions of Adjective Noun Pairs (ANP) images attract attention when observed by a human subject. We employ eye-tracking techniques to record the gaze over a set of multiple ANPs images and derive regions of interests for these ANPs. Our contribution is to study eye fixation pattern in the context of ANPs and their characteristics between being objective or subjective on the one hand and holistic vs. localizable on the other hand. Our finding indicate that subjects who differ in their assessment of ANP labels also have different eye fixation pattern. Further, we provide insights about ANP attention during implicit and explicit ANP assessment.