Motion Saliency Outweighs Other Low-level Features While Watching Videos

Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Stefan Winkler and Shih-Cheng Yen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore
4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore 117576

ABSTRACT

The importance of motion in attracting attention is well known. While watching videos, where motion is
prevalent, how do we quantify the regions that are motion salient? In this paper, we investigate the role of
motion in attention and compare it with the influence of other low-level features like image orientation and
intensity. We propose a framework for motion saliency. In particular, we integrate motion vector information
with spatial and temporal coherency to generate a motion attention map. The results show that our model
achieves good performance in identifying regions that are moving and salient. We also find motion to have
greater influence on saliency than other low-level features when watching videos.

Keywords: Visual attention, region of interest, salient features