Visual attention modelling for subjective image quality databases

The modelling of perceptual image quality metrics has experienced increased effort in recent years. In order to allow for model design, validation, and comparison, a number of subjective image quality databases has been made available to the research community. Most metrics that were designed using these databases assess the quality uniformly over the whole image, not taking into account stronger attention to salient regions of an image. In order to facilitate incorporation of visual attention (VA) into objective metric design we have conducted an eye tracking experiment. The experiment and its outcomes will be explained in detail in this paper. The actual gaze data recorded in the experiment is publicly available in order to facilitate and encourage VA modelling for image quality metrics.