A Computational Model of Eye Movements during Object Class Detection

We present a computational model of human eye movements in an object class detection task. The model combines state-of-the-art computer vision object class detection methods (SIFT features trained using AdaBoost) with a biologically plausible model of human eye movement to produce a sequence of simulated fixations, culminating with the acquisition of a target. We validated the model by comparing its behavior to the behavior of human observers performing the identical object class detection task (looking for a teddy bear among visually complex nontarget objects). We found considerable agreement between the model and human data in multiple eye movement measures, including number of fixations, cumulative probability of fixating the target, and scanpath distance.