Inferring Human Attention by Learning Latent Intentions

This paper addresses the problem of inferring 3D human attention in RGB-D videos at scene scale. 3D human attention describes where a human is looking in 3D scenes. We propose a probabilistic method to jointly model attention, intentions, and their interactions. Latent intentions guide human attention which conversely reveals the intention features. This mutual interaction makes attention inference a joint optimization with latent intentions. An EM-based approach is adopted to learn the latent intentions and model parameters. Given an RGB-D video with 3D human skeletons, a joint-state dynamic programming algorithm is utilized to jointly infer the latent intentions, the 3D attention directions, and the attention voxels in scene point clouds. Experiments on a new 3D human attention dataset prove the strength of our method.