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Laura Igual, & Santiago Segui. (2017). Introduction to Data Science – A Python Approach to Concepts, Techniques and Applications. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. 978-3-319-50016-4.
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Antonio Lopez, Atsushi Imiya, Tomas Pajdla, & Jose Manuel Alvarez. Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology: Land, Sea & Air.
Abstract: A unified view of the use of computer vision technology for different types of vehicles
Computer Vision in Vehicle Technology focuses on computer vision as on-board technology, bringing together fields of research where computer vision is progressively penetrating: the automotive sector, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles. It also serves as a reference for researchers of current developments and challenges in areas of the application of computer vision, involving vehicles such as advanced driver assistance (pedestrian detection, lane departure warning, traffic sign recognition), autonomous driving and robot navigation (with visual simultaneous localization and mapping) or unmanned aerial vehicles (obstacle avoidance, landscape classification and mapping, fire risk assessment).
The overall role of computer vision for the navigation of different vehicles, as well as technology to address on-board applications, is analysed.
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David Aldavert. (2021). Efficient and Scalable Handwritten Word Spotting on Historical Documents using Bag of Visual Words (Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Word spotting can be defined as the pattern recognition tasked aimed at locating and retrieving a specific keyword within a document image collection without explicitly transcribing the whole corpus. Its use is particularly interesting when applied in scenarios where Optical Character Recognition performs poorly or can not be used at all. This thesis focuses on such a scenario, word spotting on historical handwritten documents that have been written by a single author or by multiple authors with a similar calligraphy.
This problem requires a visual signature that is robust to image artifacts, flexible to accommodate script variations and efficient to retrieve information in a rapid manner. For this, we have developed a set of word spotting methods that on their foundation use the well known Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) representation. This representation has gained popularity among the document image analysis community to characterize handwritten words
in an unsupervised manner. However, most approaches on this field rely on a basic BoVW configuration and disregard complex encoding and spatial representations. We determine which BoVW configurations provide the best performance boost to a spotting system.
Then, we extend the segmentation-based word spotting, where word candidates are given a priori, to segmentation-free spotting. The proposed approach seeds the document images with overlapping word location candidates and characterizes them with a BoVW signature. Retrieval is achieved comparing the query and candidate signatures and returning the locations that provide a higher consensus. This is a simple but powerful approach that requires a more compact signature than in a segmentation-based scenario. We first
project the BoVW signature into a reduced semantic topics space and then compress it further using Product Quantizers. The resulting signature only requires a few dozen bytes, allowing us to index thousands of pages on a common desktop computer. The final system still yields a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art despite all the information loss during the compression phases.
Afterwards, we also study how to combine different modalities of information in order to create a query-by-X spotting system where, words are indexed using an information modality and queries are retrieved using another. We consider three different information modalities: visual, textual and audio. Our proposal is to create a latent feature space where features which are semantically related are projected onto the same topics. Creating thus a new feature space where information from different modalities can be compared. Later, we consider the codebook generation and descriptor encoding problem. The codebooks used to encode the BoVW signatures are usually created using an unsupervised clustering algorithm and, they require to test multiple parameters to determine which configuration is best for a certain document collection. We propose a semantic clustering algorithm which allows to estimate the best parameter from data. Since gather annotated data is costly, we use synthetically generated word images. The resulting codebook is database agnostic, i. e. a codebook that yields a good performance on document collections that use the same script. We also propose the use of an additional codebook to approximate descriptors and reduce the descriptor encoding
complexity to sub-linear.
Finally, we focus on the problem of signatures dimensionality. We propose a new symbol probability signature where each bin represents the probability that a certain symbol is present a certain location of the word image. This signature is extremely compact and combined with compression techniques can represent word images with just a few bytes per signature.
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Ivet Rafegas. (2017). Color in Visual Recognition: from flat to deep representations and some biological parallelisms (Maria Vanrell, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.
Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.
Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.
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Cesar de Souza. (2018). Action Recognition in Videos: Data-efficient approaches for supervised learning of human action classification models for video (Antonio Lopez, & Naila Murray, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: In this dissertation, we explore different ways to perform human action recognition in video clips. We focus on data efficiency, proposing new approaches that alleviate the need for laborious and time-consuming manual data annotation. In the first part of this dissertation, we start by analyzing previous state-of-the-art models, comparing their differences and similarities in order to pinpoint where their real strengths come from. Leveraging this information, we then proceed to boost the classification accuracy of shallow models to levels that rival deep neural networks. We introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of handcrafted spatiotemporal features classified by supervised deep networks. We show in our experiments that our hybrid model combine the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10,000 short clips) and yet improved significantly on the state of the art, including deep models trained on millions of manually labeled images and videos. In the second part of this research, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We then introduce deep multi-task representation learning architectures to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.
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Alicia Fornes, & Bart Lamiroy. (2018). Graphics Recognition, Current Trends and Evolutions (Vol. 11009). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Graphics Recognition, GREC 2017, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2017.
The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. They contain both classical and emerging topics of graphics rcognition, namely analysis and detection of diagrams, search and classification, optical music recognition, interpretation of engineering drawings and maps.
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Suman Ghosh. (2018). Word Spotting and Recognition in Images from Heterogeneous Sources A (Ernest Valveny, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Text is the most common way of information sharing from ages. With recent development of personal images databases and handwritten historic manuscripts the demand for algorithms to make these databases accessible for browsing and indexing are in rise. Enabling search or understanding large collection of manuscripts or image databases needs fast and robust methods. Researchers have found different ways to represent cropped words for understanding and matching, which works well when words are already segmented. However there is no trivial way to extend these for non-segmented documents. In this thesis we explore different methods for text retrieval and recognition from unsegmented document and scene images. Two different ways of representation exist in literature, one uses a fixed length representation learned from cropped words and another a sequence of features of variable length. Throughout this thesis, we have studied both these representation for their suitability in segmentation free understanding of text. In the first part we are focused on segmentation free word spotting using a fixed length representation. We extended the use of the successful PHOC (Pyramidal Histogram of Character) representation to segmentation free retrieval. In the second part of the thesis, we explore sequence based features and finally, we propose a unified solution where the same framework can generate both kind of representations.
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Gholamreza Anbarjafari, & Sergio Escalera. (2018). Human-Robot Interaction: Theory and Application.
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Pau Rodriguez. (2019). Towards Robust Neural Models for Fine-Grained Image Recognition (Jordi Gonzalez, Josep M. Gonfaus, & Xavier Roca, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Fine-grained recognition, i.e. identifying similar subcategories of the same superclass, is central to human activity. Recognizing a friend, finding bacteria in microscopic imagery, or discovering a new kind of galaxy, are just but few examples. However, fine-grained image recognition is still a challenging computer vision task since the differences between two images of the same category can overwhelm the differences between two images of different fine-grained categories. In this regime, where the difference between two categories resides on subtle input changes, excessively invariant CNNs discard those details that help to discriminate between categories and focus on more obvious changes, yielding poor classification performance.
On the other hand, CNNs with too much capacity tend to memorize instance-specific details, thus causing overfitting. In this thesis,motivated by the
potential impact of automatic fine-grained image recognition, we tackle the previous challenges and demonstrate that proper alignment of the inputs, multiple levels of attention, regularization, and explicitmodeling of the output space, results inmore accurate fine-grained recognitionmodels, that generalize better, and are more robust to intra-class variation. Concretely, we study the different stages of the neural network pipeline: input pre-processing, attention to regions, feature activations, and the label space. In each stage, we address different issues that hinder the recognition performance on various fine-grained tasks, and devise solutions in each chapter: i)We deal with the sensitivity to input alignment on fine-grained human facial motion such as pain. ii) We introduce an attention mechanism to allow CNNs to choose and process in detail the most discriminate regions of the image. iii)We further extend attention mechanisms to act on the network activations,
thus allowing them to correct their predictions by looking back at certain
regions, at different levels of abstraction. iv) We propose a regularization loss to prevent high-capacity neural networks to memorize instance details by means of almost-identical feature detectors. v)We finally study the advantages of explicitly modeling the output space within the error-correcting framework. As a result, in this thesis we demonstrate that attention and regularization seem promising directions to overcome the problems of fine-grained image recognition, as well as proper treatment of the input and the output space.
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Xim Cerda-Company. (2019). Understanding color vision: from psychophysics to computational modeling (Xavier Otazu, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: In this PhD we have approached the human color vision from two different points of view: psychophysics and computational modeling. First, we have evaluated 15 different tone-mapping operators (TMOs). We have conducted two experiments that
consider two different criteria: the first one evaluates the local relationships among intensity levels and the second one evaluates the global appearance of the tonemapped imagesw.r.t. the physical one (presented side by side). We conclude that the rankings depend on the criterion and they are not correlated. Considering both criteria, the best TMOs are KimKautz (Kim and Kautz, 2008) and Krawczyk (Krawczyk, Myszkowski, and Seidel, 2005). Another conclusion is that a more standardized evaluation criteria is needed to do a fair comparison among TMOs.
Secondly, we have conducted several psychophysical experiments to study the
color induction. We have studied two different properties of the visual stimuli: temporal frequency and luminance spatial distribution. To study the temporal frequency we defined equiluminant stimuli composed by both uniform and striped surrounds and we flashed them varying the flash duration. For uniform surrounds, the results show that color induction depends on both the flash duration and inducer’s chromaticity. As expected, in all chromatic conditions color contrast was induced. In contrast, for striped surrounds, we expected to induce color assimilation, but we observed color contrast or no induction. Since similar but not equiluminant striped stimuli induce color assimilation, we concluded that luminance differences could be a key factor to induce color assimilation. Thus, in a subsequent study, we have studied the luminance differences’ effect on color assimilation. We varied the luminance difference between the target region and its inducers and we observed that color assimilation depends on both this difference and the inducer’s chromaticity. For red-green condition (where the first inducer is red and the second one is green), color assimilation occurs in almost all luminance conditions.
Instead, for green-red condition, color assimilation never occurs. Purple-lime
and lime-purple chromatic conditions show that luminance difference is a key factor to induce color assimilation. When the target is darker than its surround, color assimilation is stronger in purple-lime, while when the target is brighter, color assimilation is stronger in lime-purple (’mirroring’ effect). Moreover, we evaluated whether color assimilation is due to luminance or brightness differences. Similarly to equiluminance condition, when the stimuli are equibrightness no color assimilation is induced. Our results support the hypothesis that mutual-inhibition plays a major role in color perception, or at least in color induction.
Finally, we have defined a new firing rate model of color processing in the V1
parvocellular pathway. We have modeled two different layers of this cortical area: layers 4Cb and 2/3. Our model is a recurrent dynamic computational model that considers both excitatory and inhibitory cells and their lateral connections. Moreover, it considers the existent laminar differences and the cells’ variety. Thus, we have modeled both single- and double-opponent simple cells and complex cells, which are a pool of double-opponent simple cells. A set of sinusoidal drifting gratings have been used to test the architecture. In these gratings we have varied several spatial properties such as temporal and spatial frequencies, grating’s area and orientation. To reproduce the electrophysiological observations, the architecture has to consider the existence of non-oriented double-opponent cells in layer 4Cb and the lack of lateral connections between single-opponent cells. Moreover, we have tested our lateral connections simulating the center-surround modulation and we have reproduced physiological measurements where for high contrast stimulus, the
result of the lateral connections is inhibitory, while it is facilitatory for low contrast stimulus.
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Sergio Escalera, & Ralf Herbrich. (2020). The NeurIPS’18 Competition: From Machine Learning to Intelligent Conversations (Sergio Escalera, & Ralf Hebrick, Eds.).
Abstract: This volume presents the results of the Neural Information Processing Systems Competition track at the 2018 NeurIPS conference. The competition follows the same format as the 2017 competition track for NIPS. Out of 21 submitted proposals, eight competition proposals were selected, spanning the area of Robotics, Health, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Systems and Physics. Competitions have become an integral part of advancing state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI). They exhibit one important difference to benchmarks: Competitions test a system end-to-end rather than evaluating only a single component; they assess the practicability of an algorithmic solution in addition to assessing feasibility.
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Felipe Codevilla. (2019). On Building End-to-End Driving Models Through Imitation Learning (Antonio Lopez, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.
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Zhijie Fang. (2019). Behavior understanding of vulnerable road users by 2D pose estimation (Antonio Lopez, & David Vazquez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians
and cyclists can be critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, therefore, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, i.e. from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this PhD work, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow the established traffic codes to indicate future left/right turns and stop maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed a priori. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian can allow us to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the egovehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this PhD work, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists’ intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the publicly available Daimler and JAAD datasets. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, therefore, we created our own one by acquiring
and annotating corresponding video-sequences which we aim to share with the
research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
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Juan Ignacio Toledo. (2019). Information Extraction from Heterogeneous Handwritten Documents (Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: In this thesis we explore information Extraction from totally or partially handwritten documents. Basically we are dealing with two different application scenarios. The first scenario are modern highly structured documents like forms. In this kind of documents, the semantic information is encoded in different fields with a pre-defined location in the document, therefore, information extraction becomes roughly equivalent to transcription. The second application scenario are loosely structured totally handwritten documents, besides transcribing them, we need to assign a semantic label, from a set of known values to the handwritten words.
In both scenarios, transcription is an important part of the information extraction. For that reason in this thesis we present two methods based on Neural Networks, to transcribe handwritten text.In order to tackle the challenge of loosely structured documents, we have produced a benchmark, consisting of a dataset, a defined set of tasks and a metric, that was presented to the community as an international competition. Also, we propose different models based on Convolutional and Recurrent neural networks that are able to transcribe and assign different semantic labels to each handwritten words, that is, able to perform Information Extraction.
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David Berga. (2019). Understanding Eye Movements: Psychophysics and a Model of Primary Visual Cortex (Xavier Otazu, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Humansmove their eyes in order to learn visual representations of the world. These eye movements depend on distinct factors, either by the scene that we perceive or by our own decisions. To select what is relevant to attend is part of our survival mechanisms and the way we build reality, as we constantly react both consciously and unconsciously to all the stimuli that is projected into our eyes. In this thesis we try to explain (1) how we move our eyes, (2) how to build machines that understand visual information and deploy eyemovements, and (3) how to make these machines understand tasks in order to decide for eye movements.
(1) We provided the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of 230 synthetically-generated image patterns. A total of 15 types of stimuli has been generated (e.g. orientation, brightness, color, size, etc.), with 7 feature contrasts for each feature category. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of the dataset, using Free-Viewing and Visual Search task instructions. Results showed that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. Temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. From such dataset (SID4VAM), we have computed a benchmark of saliency models by testing performance using psychophysical patterns. Model performance has been evaluated considering model inspiration and consistency with human psychophysics. Our study reveals that state-of-the-art Deep Learning saliency models do not performwell with synthetic pattern images, instead, modelswith Spectral/Fourier inspiration outperform others in saliency metrics and are more consistent with human psychophysical experimentation.
(2) Computations in the primary visual cortex (area V1 or striate cortex) have long been hypothesized to be responsible, among several visual processing mechanisms, of bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). In order to validate this hypothesis, images from eye tracking datasets have been processed with a biologically plausible model of V1 (named Neurodynamic SaliencyWaveletModel or NSWAM). Following Li’s neurodynamic model, we define V1’s lateral connections with a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation and scale. Early subcortical processes (i.e. retinal and thalamic) are functionally simulated. The resulting saliency maps are generated from the model output, representing the neuronal activity of V1 projections towards brain areas involved in eye movement control. We want to pinpoint that our unified computational architecture is able to reproduce several visual processes (i.e. brightness, chromatic induction and visual discomfort) without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parametrization. The model has been extended (NSWAM-CM) with an implementation of the cortical magnification function to define the retinotopical projections towards V1, processing neuronal activity for each distinct view during scene observation. Novel computational definitions of top-down inhibition (in terms of inhibition of return and selection mechanisms), are also proposed to predict attention in Free-Viewing and Visual Search conditions. Results show that our model outperforms other biologically-inpired models of saliency prediction as well as to predict visual saccade sequences, specifically for nature and synthetic images. We also show how temporal and spatial characteristics of inhibition of return can improve prediction of saccades, as well as how distinct search strategies (in terms of feature-selective or category-specific inhibition) predict attention at distinct image contexts.
(3) Although previous scanpath models have been able to efficiently predict saccades during Free-Viewing, it is well known that stimulus and task instructions can strongly affect eye movement patterns. In particular, task priming has been shown to be crucial to the deployment of eye movements, involving interactions between brain areas related to goal-directed behavior, working and long-termmemory in combination with stimulus-driven eyemovement neuronal correlates. In our latest study we proposed an extension of the Selective Tuning Attentive Reference Fixation ControllerModel based on task demands (STAR-FCT), describing novel computational definitions of Long-TermMemory, Visual Task Executive and Task Working Memory. With these modules we are able to use textual instructions in order to guide the model to attend to specific categories of objects and/or places in the scene. We have designed our memorymodel by processing a visual hierarchy of low- and high-level features. The relationship between the executive task instructions and the memory representations has been specified using a tree of semantic similarities between the learned features and the object category labels. Results reveal that by using this model, the resulting object localizationmaps and predicted saccades have a higher probability to fall inside the salient regions depending on the distinct task instructions compared to saliency.
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