Abstract


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Click to download PDF version Click to download BibTeX data Clik to view abstract V. Navalpakkam, L. Itti, Modeling the influence of task on attention, Vision Research, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 205-231, Jan 2005. [2003 impact factor: 1.958] (Cited by 903)

Abstract: We propose a computational model for the task-specific guidance of visual attention in real-world scenes. Our model emphasizes four aspects that are important in biological vision: determining task-relevance of an entity, biasing attention for the low-level visual features of desired targets, recognizing these targets using the same low-level features, and incrementally building a visual map of task-relevance at every scene location. Given a task definition in the form of keywords, the model first determines and stores the task-relevant entities in working memory, using prior knowledge stored in long-term memory. It attempts to detect the most relevant entity by biasing its visual attention system with the entity's learned low-level features. It attends to the most salient location in the scene, and attempts to recognize the attended object through hierarchical matching against object representations stored in long-term memory. It updates its working memory with the task-relevance of the recognized entity and updates a topographic task-relevance map with the location and relevance of the recognized entity. The model is tested on three types of tasks: single-target detection in 343 natural and synthetic images, where biasing for the target accelerates target detection over two-fold on average; sequential multiple-target detection in 28 natural images, where biasing, recognition, working memory and long term memory contribute to rapidly finding all targets; and learning a map of likely locations of cars from a video clip filmed while driving on a highway. The model's performance on search for single features and feature conjunctions is consistent with existing pyschophysical data. These results of our biologically-motivated architecture suggest that the model may provide a reasonable approximation to many brain processes involved in complex task-driven visual behaviors.

Keywords: Attention ; top-down ; bottom-up ; object detection ; recognition ; task-relevance ; scene analysis

Themes: Model of Bottom-Up Saliency-Based Visual Attention, Model of Top-Down Attentional Modulation, Computational Modeling, Scene Understanding

 

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