Computational Models of Visual Attention

Abstract

Even the enormous processing capacity of the human brain is not enough to handle all the visual sensory information that falls upon the retina. Still human beings can efficiently respond to the external stimuli. Selective attention plays an important role here. It helps to select only the pertinent portions of the scene being viewed for further processing at the deeper brain. Computational modeling of this neuro-psychological phenomenon has the potential to enrich many computer vision tasks. Enormous amounts of research involving psychovisual experiments and computational models of attention have been and are being carried out all within the past few decades. This article compiles a good volume of these research efforts. It also discusses various aspects related to computational modeling of attention–such as, choice of features, evaluation of these models, and so forth.