Where to look at the movies: Analyzing visual attention to understand movie editing

In the process of making a movie, directors constantly care about where the spectator will look on the screen. Shot composition, framing, camera movements, or editing are tools commonly used to direct attention. In order to provide a quantitative analysis of the relationship between those tools and gaze patterns, we propose a new eye-tracking database, containing gaze-pattern information on movie sequences, as well as editing annotations, and we show how state-of-the-art computational saliency techniques behave on this dataset. In this work, we expose strong links between movie editing and spectators gaze distributions, and open several leads on how the knowledge of editing information could improve human visual attention modeling for cinematic content. The dataset generated and analyzed for this study is available at https://github.com/abruckert/eye_tracking_filmmaking.