I’m excited to announce that I’ve started my PhD at the PRISME Laboratory, University of Orleans, France!
The Research Topic
My thesis focuses on visual attention for art and paintings - understanding and modeling how humans look at and perceive artworks.
What is Visual Attention?
Visual attention is the cognitive process that allows humans to selectively focus on specific parts of a visual scene while ignoring others. When we look at an image, our eyes don’t scan it uniformly - instead, we make rapid eye movements called saccades that jump from one point of interest to another, with brief pauses called fixations where our gaze rests and we actually “see” the content.
The sequence of these fixations is called a scanpath, and it reveals a lot about how we perceive and process visual information. Understanding scanpaths is crucial for:
- Predicting where people will look in images
- Understanding what captures human attention
- Improving visual communication and design
- Applications in marketing, UI/UX, and cultural heritage
PhD Goals
My research aims to:
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Collect Eye-Tracking Data: Conduct experiments to gather gaze data from viewers observing paintings and artworks. This will create valuable datasets for training and evaluating computational models.
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Build Scanpath Prediction Models: Develop deep learning models that can predict the sequence of eye movements a person would make when viewing an image, particularly for art and cultural heritage content.
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Advance Understanding: Contribute to our understanding of how humans perceive art, which has implications for museum curation, digital art presentation, and cultural heritage preservation.
I’m looking forward to this journey and will share updates as the research progresses!