Where to look at the movies : Analyzing visual attention to understand movie editing
This work addresses the need for quantitative analysis of visual attention in movies, which is incremental as it builds on existing saliency modeling by introducing a new dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding how movie editing directs viewer attention by creating a new eye-tracking database with gaze patterns and editing annotations, and they found strong links between editing and scanpaths while showing that state-of-the-art saliency techniques perform on this dataset.
In the process of making a movie, directors constantly care about where the spectator will look on the screen. Shot composition, framing, camera movements or editing are tools commonly used to direct attention. In order to provide a quantitative analysis of the relationship between those tools and gaze patterns, we propose a new eye-tracking database, containing gaze pattern information on movie sequences, as well as editing annotations, and we show how state-of-the-art computational saliency techniques behave on this dataset. In this work, we expose strong links between movie editing and spectators scanpaths, and open several leads on how the knowledge of editing information could improve human visual attention modeling for cinematic content. The dataset generated and analysed during the current study is available at https://github.com/abruckert/eye_tracking_filmmaking