Interestingness -- the power of attracting or holding one's attention.

Our daily life is greatly influenced by what we consume and see. On one hand, we decide based on our personal interests which news, movies, or other events we focus our attention on. On the other hand, most people are also very open to external visual stimuli that could influence their behavior. To learn more about human visual perception and its effects on judging events as interesting, but also for commercial purposes, it is of great interest to understand what triggers human attention and interest.

For instance, models of what people consider 'interesting' could be used to automatically analyze video streams in video surveillance applications and alert users. Or it can help people in their work by automatically highlighting 'interesting' facts that might otherwise have been overlooked. This is especially important in time-critical scenarios where someone needs to quickly get an overview of many facts, such as in medical emergency care.

• F. Abdullahu and H. Grabner, Commonly Interesting Images, In Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024, Data and Code on GitHub
• T. Koller, and H. Grabner, Who wants to be a click-millionaire? On the influence of thumbnails and captions. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2022

Over the past several decades, visual imagery has become the dominant element in modern advertising. A common content strategy involves depicting humans, animals, or objects in the midst of motion. Whereas previous research indicates that implied motion images enhance persuasion, it is unclear whether this effect is unique to depictions of moving humans or if it also applies to depictions of moving animals (e.g., a dolphin jumping out of the water) and moving objects (e.g., a car driving on a street, a burger being tossed in the air). Across a set of seven experimental studies, we provide robust evidence that images depicting animate and inanimate motion increase the persuasiveness of an advertisement and that this effect occurs through enhanced engagement. Our findings further indicate that the level of engagement is influenced by the complexity of the depicted motion, with more complex, nonlinear movements eliciting greater engagement than simpler, linear movements. Overall, this research contributes to the advertising literature by providing an empirically grounded account of implied motion imagery and by helping marketers create more effective advertising.

• ZHAW Medienlinguistik
• F. Bünzli, W. Weber, F. Abdullahu, and H. Grabner, Depicting Humans, Animals, and Objects in Motion: The Effect of Implied Motion on Engagement and Persuasion in Advertising? Journal of Advertising, 2024
• F. Bünzli, W. Weber, F  Abdullahu, and H. Grabner, Do Vectors of Motion Make Advertisements More Interesting? Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), 2023

It initiates the paradigm shift in surgical training for optimally prepared surgeons and even greater patient safety.

Training on patients according to the principle of “see one, do one and teach one” no longer corresponds to today’s requirements and technical opportunities regarding education of surgical residents. During the Covid-19 pandemic, most hands-on training had to be discontinued, leading to an almost complete interruption of surgical education.   Under the lead of the three clinical partners Kantonsspital St.Gallen, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, and Balgrist University Hospital, endorsed by the Swiss Surgical Societies, novel standardized and proficiency-based surgical training curricula are defined and interfaced to simulation tools. The four implementation partners VirtaMed AG, Microsoft Mixed Reality & AI Lab Zurich, OramaVR SA and Atracsys LLC, in collaboration with ETHZ and ZHAW develop these innovative training tools ranging from online virtual reality simulation, augmented box trainers, high-end simulators, to augmented-reality-enabled open surgery and immersive remote operation room participation. The proposed developments introduce a fully novel, integrative training paradigm installed and demonstrated on two example surgical modalities, laparoscopy and arthroscopy, while fully generalizable to other interventions. This will set new standards both in Switzerland and abroad.

• L. Wu, M. Seibold, N. Cavalcanti, J. Hein, T. Gerth, R. Lekar, A. Hoch, L. Vlachopoulos, H. Grabner, P. Zingg, M. Farshad, and P. Fürnstahl, A novel augmented reality-based simulator for enhancing orthopedic surgical training. Computers in Biology and Medicine, Volume 185, 2025
• https://www.surgicalproficiency.ch
• ZHAW Impact
• OR-X, ROCS Balgrist
• ETH Computer Vision and Learning Group

Yellow nutsedge (Erdmandelgras, Cyperus esculentus) is an invasive neophyte that causes great damage to agriculture in Switzerland. The earlier the yellow nutsedge is detected, the easier it is to remediate affected fields. There is currently no organized monitoring; the weed is typically discovered by chance. The aim of this project is to use drone images and computer vision methods to detect yellow nutsedge from the air. The project partners are the Institute of Natural Resource Sciences (Geoinformatics Research Group) and Agroscope. The aerial images of various infested fields with different crops are enriched with geocoordinates and manually annotated by experts. The produced images are utilized for training a cutting-edge deep neural network, enabling it to identify and pinpoint yellow nutsedge in new, unseen images, which are then mapped onto an overview orthophoto

• ZHAW Geoinformatics Research Group 
• M. Keller, J. Junghardt, H. Grabner, R. Total. Mit Drohnen und Algorithmen Erdmandelgras aufspüren. Gemüsebau Info, 18, 2022, 2