Visual attention refers to the cognitive mechanism that allows us to select and process only the relevant information arriving at our eyes. Therefore, eye movements will have a significant dependency on visual attention. Saliency models, trying to simulate visual gaze and consequently, visual attention, have been continuously developed over the last years. Color information has been shown to play an important role in visual attention, and it is used in saliency computations. However, psychophysical evidence explaining the relationship between color and saliency is lacking. The results of the experiment will be presented aiming at studying and quantifying saliency of colors of different hues and lightness specified in CIELab coordinates. In the experiment, 12 observers were asked to report the number of color patches presented at random locations on a masking gray background. Eye movements were recorded using an SMI remote eye tracking system and being used to validate the reported data. In the presentation, we will compare the reported data and visual gaze data for different colors and discuss implications for our understanding of color saliency and color processing.
Sergio Etchebehere, Elena Fedorovskaya, "On the Role of Color in Visual Saliency" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Human Vision and Electronic Imaging, 2017, pp 58 - 63, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2017.14.HVEI-119