Biologically-Inspired Models for Attentive Robot Vision

Abstract

A rich stream of visual data enters the cameras of a typical artificial vision system (e.g., a robot) and considering the fact that processing this volume of data in real-rime is almost impossible, a clever mechanism is required to reduce the amount of trivial visual data. Visual Attention might be the solution. The idea is to control the information flow and thus to improve vision by focusing the resources merely on some special aspects instead of the whole visual scene. However, does attention only speed-up processing or can the understanding of human visual attention provide additional guidance for robot vision research? In this chapter, first, some basic concepts of the primate visual system and visual attention are introduced. Afterward, a new taxonomy of biologically-inspired models of attention, particularly those that are used in robotics applications (e.g., in object detection and recognition) is given and finally, future research trends in modelling of visual attention and its applications are highlighted.