What's Catching Your Eye? the Visual Attention Mechanism

Every agent, whether animal or robotic, needs to process its visual sensory input in an efficient way, to allow understanding of, and interaction with, the environment. The process of filtering revelant information out of the continuous bombardment of complex sensory data is called selective attention. Visual attention is the result of the complex interplay between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms to perceptually organise and understand the scene. Giulia will describe how to approach visual attention using bio-inspired models emulating the human visual system to allow robots to interact with their surroundings.