Probabilistic Multi-Task Learning for Visual Saliency Estimation in Video

In this paper, we present a probabilistic multi-task learning approach for visual saliency estimation in video. In our approach, the problem of visual saliency estimation is modeled by simultaneously considering the stimulus-driven and task-related factors in a probabilistic framework. In this framework, a stimulus-driven component simulates the low-level processes in human vision system using multi-scale wavelet decomposition and unbiased feature competition; while a task-related component simulates the high-level processes to bias the competition of the input features. Different from existing approaches, we propose a multi-task learning algorithm to learn the task-related “stimulus-saliency” mapping functions for each scene. The algorithm also learns various fusion strategies, which are used to integrate the stimulus-driven and task-related components to obtain the visual saliency. Extensive experiments were carried out on two public eye-fixation datasets and one regional saliency dataset. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms eight state-of-the-art approaches remarkably.