As AI models are increasingly integrated into applications involving human interaction, understanding the alignment between human perception and machine vision has become essential. One example is the estimation of visual motion (optical flow) in dynamic applications such as driving assistance. While there are numerous optical flow datasets and benchmarks with ground truth information, human-perceived flow in natural scenes remains underexplored. We introduce HuPerFlow—a benchmark for human-perceived flow, measured at 2,400 locations across ten optical flow datasets, with ∼38,400 response vectors collected through online psychophysical experiments. Our data demonstrate that human-perceived flow aligns with ground truth in spatiotemporally smooth locations while also showing systematic errors influenced by various environmental properties. Additionally, we evaluated several optical flow algorithms against human-perceived flow, uncovering both similarities and unique aspects of human perception in complex natural scenes. HuPerFlow is the first large-scale human-perceived flow benchmark for alignment between computer vision models and human perception, as well as for scientific exploration of human motion perception in natural scenes. The HuPerFlow benchmark is publicly available on the HuPerFlow website.

Visual motion processing is essential for humans to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Despite extensive research in cognitive neuroscience, image-computable models that can extract informative motion flow from natural scenes in a manner consistent with human visual processing have yet to be established. Meanwhile, recent advancements in computer vision (CV), propelled by deep learning, have led to significant progress in optical flow estimation, a task closely related to motion perception. Here we propose an image-computable model of human motion perception by bridging the gap between biological and CV models. Specifically, we introduce a novel two-stages approach that combines trainable motion energy sensing with a recurrent self-attention network for adaptive motion integration and segregation. This model architecture aims to capture the computations in V1-MT, the core structure for motion perception in the biological visual system, while providing the ability to derive informative motion flow for a wide range of stimuli, including complex natural scenes. In silico neurophysiology reveals that our model's unit responses are similar to mammalian neural recordings regarding motion pooling and speed tuning. The proposed model can also replicate human responses to a range of stimuli examined in past psychophysical studies. The experimental results on the Sintel benchmark demonstrate that our model predicts human responses better than the ground truth, whereas the state-of-the-art CV models show the opposite. Our study provides a computational architecture consistent with human visual motion processing, although the physiological correspondence may not be exact.

Unconscious attention shift has been proven to be automatic, effortless, and unresisting; however, whether it is applicable to images of complex scene remains to be verified. We propose a novel method for directing human visual attention by flashing a short-duration visual stimulus before presenting the image. This method directs viewer's visual attention to an arbitrary location in the image without engaging the viewer's awareness. Unlike previous studies using simple stimuli (e.g. simple geometric figures, image of uniform color, or artificial white-noise), we use complex color images for guiding unconscious visual attention in real-world. To our best knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating that short-duration cues presented at arbitrary locations can attract human visual attention in a complex scene. The proposed method is useful for applications that require efficient and unresisting attention shift to the target image area.