Saliency-based image editing for guiding visual attention

The most important part of an information system that assists human activities is a natural interface with human beings. Gaze information strongly reflects the human interest or their attention, and thus, a gaze-based interface is promising for future usage. In particular, if we can smoothly guide the user's visual attention toward a target without interrupting their current visual attention, the usefulness of the gaze-based interface will be highly enhanced. To realize such an interface, this paper proposes a method for editing an image, when given a region in the image, to synthesize the image in which the region is most salient. Our method first computes a saliency map of a given image and then iteratively adjusts the intensity and color until the saliency inside the region becomes the highest for the entire image. Experimental results confirm that our image editing method naturally draws the human visual attention toward our specified region.