A Biologically Inspired System for Classification of Natural Images

A system for visual information analysis and classification based on a biologically inspired visual selective attention model with knowledge structuring is presented. The system is derived from well-known analogous processes in the visual system of primates and inference procedures of the human brain. It consists of three main units: biologically inspired visual selective attention, knowledge structuring, and clustering of visual information. The biologically inspired visual selective attention unit closely follow the mechanisms of the visual what pathway and where pathway in the primates' brain. It uses a bottom-up approach to generate a salient area based on low-level features extracted from natural images. The scale selection to determine suitable size of salient areas uses a maximum entropy approach. This unit also contains a low-level top-down selective attention module that performs decisions on interesting objects by human interaction. In this module, a reinforcement/inhibition mechanism is exploited. The knowledge structuring unit automatically creates a relevance map from salient image areas generated by the biologically inspired unit. It also derives a set of well-structured representations from low-level descriptions to drive the final classification. The knowledge structuring unit relys on human knowledge to produce suitable links between low-level descriptions and high-level representation on a limited training set. The backbone of this unit is a distribution mapping strategy involving two basic modules: structured low-level feature extraction using convolution neural network and a topology representation module based on a growing cell structure network. The third unit of the system classification is achieved by simulating high-level top-down visual information perception and clustering using an incremental Bayesian parameter estimation method. The proposed modular system architecture offers straightforward expansion to include user relevance feedback, contextual input, and multimodal information if available