Touch saliency

Abstract

In this work, we propose a new concept of touch saliency, and attempt to answer the question of whether the underlying image saliency map may be implicitly derived from the accumulative touch behaviors (or more specifically speaking, zoom-in and panning manipulations) when many users browse the image on smart mobile devices with multi-touch display of small size. The touch saliency maps are collected for the images of the recently released NUSEF dataset, and the preliminary comparison study demonstrates: 1) the touch saliency map is highly correlated with human eye fixation map for the same stimuli, yet compared to the latter, the touch data collection is much more flexible and requires no cooperation from users; and 2) the touch saliency is also well predictable by popular saliency detection algorithms. This study opens a new research direction of multimedia analysis by harnessing human touch information on increasingly popular multi-touch smart mobile devices. © 2012 ACM.