Can we accurately predict where we look at paintings?

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate and to simulate the gaze deployment of observers on paintings. For that purpose, we built a large eye tracking dataset composed of 150 paintings belonging to 5 art movements. We observed that the gaze deployment over the proposed paintings was very similar to the gaze deployment over natural scenes. Therefore, we evaluate existing saliency models and propose a new one which significantly outperforms the most recent deep-based saliency models. Thanks to this new saliency model, we can predict very accurately what are the salient areas of a painting. This opens new avenues for many image-based applications such as animation of paintings or transformation of a still painting into a video clip.