A bio-inspired proposal for focus attention while preserving information

Abstract

The interplay between the design of layered computing systems and the study of real visual structures and functions is a very fruitful area in which the characteristics of the natural systems inspire properties and design criteria of the artificial counterparts. Visual saliency and attention mechanism are two of the most explored and interesting features of the visual processing in higher vertebrates. In general, visual saliency refers at the propensity of some visual features to attract attention, while attention by itself requires a voluntary effort to locate places of interest in the visual scene. In this paper we present a study of a mechanism of attention that has variable selection criteria based in highlighting some feature or object in the image while blurring the rest of it. The fact that all the information is preserved in the process, allow us to be able to select a new location of interest in a efficient way. This mechanism is based in a class of transform which combines partitions of the data field and functionals acting on them and is suitable to perform a selection process of the attended location with different levels of resolution.