Abstract—We demonstrate the usefulness of surroundedness for eye fixation prediction by proposing a Boolean Map based Saliency model (BMS). In our formulation, an image is characterized by a set of binary images, which are generated by randomly thresholding the image’s feature maps in a whitened feature space. Based on a Gestalt principle of figure-ground segregation, BMS computes a saliency map by discovering surrounded regions via topological analysis of Boolean maps. Furthermore, we draw a connection between BMS and the Minimum Barrier Distance to provide insight into why and how BMS can properly captures the surroundedness cue via Boolean maps. The strength of BMS is verified by its simplicity, efficiency and superior performance compared with ten state-of-the-art methods on seven eye tracking benchmark datasets.

1 A saliency map is a model that predicts eye fixations on a visual scene. In other words, it is the prediction of saliency areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand crafted features inspired on neuroscience principles. This work however addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional network. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train a not very deep network architecture which is both fast and accurate. In our system, named JuntingNet, the learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The convolutional network developed in this work, named JuntingNet, won the CVPR Large-scale Scene UNderstanding (LSUN) 2015 challenge on saliency prediction with a superior performance in all considered metrics.