Preliminary Study Towards a Fuzzy Model for Visual Attention

Anca Ralescu, Isabelle Bloch, Roberto M. Cesar

Abstract: Attention, in particular visual attention, has been a subject of studies in various disciplines, including cognitive science, experimental psychology, and computer vision. In cognitive science and experimental psychology the objective is to develop theories that can explain the attention phenomenon of cognition. In computer vision, the objective is to inform image understanding systems by hypotheses on the human visual attention. There is, however, very little influence of studies across these two disciplines. In a departure from this state of affairs, this study seeks to develop an algorithmic approach to visual attention as part of an image understanding system, by starting with a theory of visual attention put forward in experimental psychology. In the process, it will become useful to revise some of the concepts of this theory, in particular by adopting fuzzy set based representations and the necessary calculus for them.