Influences of Global and Local Features on Eye-Movement Patterns in Visual-Similarity Perception of Synthesized Texture Images

Global and local features are essential for visual-similarity texture perception. Therefore, understanding how people allocate their visual attention when viewing textures with global or local similarity is important. In this work, we investigate the influences of global and local features of a texture on eye-movement patterns and analyze the relationship between eye-movement patterns and visual-similarity selection. First, we synthesized textures by separately controlling global and local textural features through the primitive, grain, and point configuration (PGPC) texture model, a mathematical morphology-based texture model. Second, we conducted an experiment to acquire eye-movement data where participants identified the texture that was highly similar to the standard texture. Experiment data were obtained through an eye-tracker from 60 participants. The collected eye-tracking data were analyzed in terms of three metrics, including total fixation duration in each region of interest (ROI), fixation-point variance in each ROI, and fixation-transfer counts between different ROIs. Analysis results indicated the following. (1) The global and local features of a texture influenced eye-movement patterns. In particular, the texture image that was globally similar to the standard texture contained dispersed fixation points. By contrast, the texture image that was locally similar to the standard texture contained concentrated fixation points. The domination of global and local features influenced the viewers’ similarity choice. (2) The final visual-similarity selection was related to the fixation-transfer count between different ROIs, but not to the fixation time in each ROI. This research also extends the applicability of the mathematical morphology-based texture model to human visual perception.