Abstract

L. Itti, Bottom up and top-down guidance of visual attention in natural environments, International Conference of Psychology (ICP), Symposium on Current Views in Scene Perception, July 2008.

Abstract: The natural world affords a complexity which makes its comprehension highly complex. To cope with this complexity, biological systems have evolved attentional strategies which rapidly focus processing resources on the most important and relevant aspects of the incoming sensory data. Here I describe several exciting new research directions that study the joint stimulus-driven (or bottom-up) and goal-driven (or top-down) influences on attentional allocation. I describe a new computational model which processes video inputs and predicts where observers look under different task conditions. I discuss results of testing this model against human eye movement recordings over several hours of video stimuli.

Themes: Model of Bottom-Up Saliency-Based Visual Attention, Model of Top-Down Attentional Modulation, Human Eye-Tracking Research