Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 2030: High-Resolution Neural Network for Driver Visual Attention Prediction (Sensors)

Driving is a task that puts heavy demands on visual information, thereby the human visual system plays a critical role in making proper decisions for safe driving. Understanding a driver’s visual attention and relevant behavior information is a challenging but essential task in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and efficient autonomous vehicles (AV). Specifically, robust prediction of a driver’s attention from images could be a crucial key to assist intelligent vehicle systems where a self-driving car is required to move safely interacting with the surrounding environment. Thus, in this paper, we investigate a human driver’s visual behavior in terms of computer vision to estimate the driver’s attention locations in images. First, we show that feature representations at high resolution improves visual attention prediction accuracy and localization performance when being fused with features at low-resolution. To demonstrate this, we employ a deep convolutional neural network framework that learns and extracts feature representations at multiple resolutions. In particular, the network maintains the feature representation with the highest resolution at the original image resolution. Second, attention prediction tends to be biased toward centers of images when neural networks are trained using typical visual attention datasets. To avoid overfitting to the center-biased solution, the network is trained using diverse regions of images. Finally, the experimental results verify that our proposed framework improves the prediction accuracy of a driver’s attention locations.