Attention mechanisms for vision in a dynamic world

Three elements of attention in computer vision are described. These are related to familiar aspects of eye movement control in human vision: foveation, to examine selected regions of the visual world at high resolution; tracking, to stabilize the images of moving objects within the eye; and high-level interpretation, to anticipate where salient information will occur in a scene. Attention mechanisms allow the system to function in a data-rich world by directing system sensing and analysis resources to only that information critical to the system's current visual task. It is concluded that attention therefore includes mechanisms for directing the allocation of processing and mechanisms for rapidly interpreting the information as it is gathered.<
>