Abstract
In systems that operate in real time, the manner in which resources are allocated often determines the success of a system or the failure thereof. The human visual system manages to operate in real time by repeating in order, processes of Fixation, Attention and Recognition. In essence, it chooses regions of interest in the visual scene and subsequently concentrates its computational resources on them. In this paper, we attempt to emulate this characteristic of the human visual system. We present operators for Visual Attention and Retinal Fixation, neural architectures that implement them, and simulation results that confirm the effectiveness of the underlying mechanisms. We also discuss the biological plausibility of our model in light of some of the available data on the functional characteristics of the visual system.