A Sparse Coding Framework for Gaze Prediction in Egocentric Video

To efficiently process and understand a large amount of incoming visual information from first-person perspective (i.e. egocentric vision), predicting human gaze is important. However, even though people continuously gaze in noisy environments, most existing gaze prediction methods mainly use image saliency, which is sensitive to noise in the real-world. To address this issue, we propose a sparse coding-based saliency detection method for gaze prediction. Our model uses a cost function with the 10 norm as a sparse constraint that can control the area of visual saliency in response to the contents of egocentric vision in intuitive and consistent ways. Moreover, we use canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to combine different types of features for reducing noise and the computational complexity. We also utilize the temporal continuity of image frames when defining our saliency. Experiments using a real-world gaze dataset show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on gaze prediction in egocentric videos.