Toward a Neurobiological Theory of Visual Attention.

Abstract

The purpose of this effort was to study visual, focal selective attention and its implementation in the primate visual system from a computational point of view. It is know that at the neuronal level, two cortical pathways exists that are responsible for mediating attention: the where pathway that selects interesting or conspicuous locations and the what pathway that identifies and recognizes objects. In the effort, it was shown how neuronal networks based on those found in the cerebral cortex can implemented these pathways using real images. In particular, the use of a saliency map, that encodes how "interesting" or "salient" locations are in the visual field (rather than what features are present at these locations) represents a powerful strategy to aid visual search.These algorithms are being ported onto Pentium-based machines for various machine-vision applications.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1995
Accession Number
ADA299945

Entities

People

  • Christoff Koch

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Cerebral Cortex
  • Computer Vision

Readers

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Neuroscience