Predicting the Category and Attributes of Mental Pictures Using Deep Gaze Pooling

Previous work focused on predicting visual search targets from human fixations but, in the real world, a specific target is often not known, e.g. when searching for a present for a friend. In this work we instead study the problem of predicting the mental picture, i.e. only an abstract idea instead of a specific target. This task is significantly more challenging given that mental pictures of the same target category can vary widely depending on personal biases, and given that characteristic target attributes can often not be verbalised explicitly. We instead propose to use gaze information as implicit information on users’ mental picture and present a novel gaze pooling layer to seamlessly integrate semantic and localized fixation information into a deep image representation. We show that we can robustly predict both the mental picture’s category as well as attributes on a novel dataset containing fixation data of 14 users searching for targets on a subset of the DeepFahion dataset. Our results have important implications for future search interfaces and suggest deep gaze pooling as a general-purpose approach for gaze-supported computer vision systems.