What I'm working on: Image Analysis at 3M

I'm working on an interesting project at 3M.  The Visual Attention Service (https://vas.3m.com/) is an online service that will analyze an image and tell you what parts of the image a viewer is most likely to look at in the first few seconds.

A very useful thing in designing advertising... what will users notice first?  The surgeon generals warning or the 10% off coupon?

So here's a real world example of the tool in action:

If you are not familiar with this image it's a classic bit of software developer humor about compiling and testing code.

It turns out that the tool believes that most people will notice the scary monsters first NOT the kittens (as shown by the heat map below)...

DISCLAIMER: No kittens where actually harmed in the creation of this blog post.