Saliency Map Estimation for Omni-Directional Image Considering Prior Distributions
This addresses a domain-specific problem for virtual reality applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing planar image methods.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating saliency maps for omni-directional images used in virtual environments, proposing novel methods that consider prior distributions of fixations, but no concrete results or numbers are provided.
In recent years, the deep learning techniques have been applied to the estimation of saliency maps, which represent probability density functions of fixations when people look at the images. Although the methods of saliency-map estimation have been actively studied for 2-dimensional planer images, the methods for omni-directional images to be utilized in virtual environments had not been studied, until a competition of saliency-map estimation for the omni-directional images was held in ICME2017. In this paper, novel methods for estimating saliency maps for the omni-directional images are proposed considering the properties of prior distributions for fixations in the planar images and the omni-directional images.