HEOI: Human Attention Prediction in Natural Daily Life With Fine-Grained Human-Environment-Object Interaction Model

Abstract

This paper handles the problem of human attention prediction in natural daily life from the third-person view. Due to the significance of this topic in various applications, researchers in the computer vision community have proposed many excellent models in the past few decades, and many models have begun to focus on natural daily life scenarios in recent years. However, existing mainstream models usually ignore a basic fact that human attention is a typical interdisciplinary concept. Specifically, the mainstream definition is direction-level or pixel-level, while many interdisciplinary studies argue the object-level definition. Additionally, the mainstream model structure converges to the dual-pathway architecture or its variants, while the majority of interdisciplinary studies claim attention is involved in the human-environment interaction procedure. Grounded on solid theories and studies in interdisciplinary fields including computer vision, cognition, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, this paper proposes a fine-grained Human-Environment-Object Interaction (HEOI) model, which for the first time integrates multi-granularity human cues to predict human attention. Our model is explainable and lightweight, and validated to be effective by a wide range of comparison, ablation, and visualization experiments on two public datasets.