MemX: An Attention-Aware Smart Eyewear System for Personalized Moment Auto-capture

TL;DR

MemX is a biologically-inspired, attention-aware smart eyewear system that captures personalized visual moments by analyzing salient content and tracking human attention efficiently on resource-limited devices.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel temporal visual attention network that unifies attention tracking and salient content analysis for personalized moment capture.

Findings

MemX significantly improves attention tracking accuracy.

The system maintains high energy efficiency.

Pilot studies confirm feasibility and benefits.

Abstract

This work presents MemX: a biologically-inspired attention-aware eyewear system developed with the goal of pursuing the long-awaited vision of a personalized visual Memex. MemX captures human visual attention on the fly, analyzes the salient visual content, and records moments of personal interest in the form of compact video snippets. Accurate attentive scene detection and analysis on resource-constrained platforms is challenging because these tasks are computation and energy intensive. We propose a new temporal visual attention network that unifies human visual attention tracking and salient visual content analysis. Attention tracking focuses computation-intensive video analysis on salient regions, while video analysis makes human attention detection and tracking more accurate. Using the YouTube-VIS dataset and 30 participants, we experimentally show that MemX significantly improves the attention tracking accuracy over the eye-tracking-alone method, while maintaining high system energy efficiency. We have also conducted 11 in-field pilot studies across a range of daily usage scenarios, which demonstrate the feasibility and potential benefits of MemX.