Visual Attention for Behavioral Biometric Systems

Background Of Attentional Research

Human vision system seems to apply serial computational strategy when inspecting complex visual scenes. Particular locations in scenes are selected based on their relevance from both the objective and subjective point of view, with reference to the observer, i.e. In notable study of 1967, Yarbus (Yarbus, A. L. (1967)) demonstrated that perception of complex scene involves complicated pattern of fixations, where the eye stands still, and saccades, where the eye moves to include in the fovea a part of the scene. Basically, fixations occur for zones that are salient to determine specific features of the scene under consideration. Therefore when humans look a face, they usually concentrate the attention (evidenced by the saccadic movements) to the main facial features like eyes, nose, mouth, etc.. See Figure 1 for instance. The distributions of those movements are strongly connected to the personal psychology.