Modeling attention to salient proto-objects

Selective visual attention is believed to be responsible for serializing visual information for recognizing one object at a time in a complex scene. But how can we attend to objects before they are recognized? In coherence theory of visual cognition, so-called proto-objects form volatile units of visual information that can be accessed by selective attention and subsequently validated as actual objects. We propose a biologically plausible model of forming and attending to proto-objects in natural scenes. We demonstrate that the suggested model can enable a model of object recognition in cortex to expand from recognizing individual objects in isolation to sequentially recognizing all objects in a more complex scene. c 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: NN
• Authors: Dirk Walther, Christof Koch
• Keywords: Neural Networks, NN 2006, Selective Visual Attention, Visual, Visual Information