An attentional approach for perceptual grouping of spatially distributed patterns

Abstract

A natural (human) eye can easily detect large visual patterns or objects emerging from spatially distributed discrete entities. This aspect of pattern analysis has been barely addressed in literature. We propose a biologically inspired approach derived from the concept of visual attention to associate together the distributed pieces of macro level patterns. In contrast to the usual approach practiced by the existing models of visual attention, this paper introduces a short-term excitation on the features and locations related to the current focus of attention in parallel to the spatial inhibition of return. This causes the attention system to fixate on analogous units in the scene that may formulate a meaningful global pattern. It is evident from the results of experiments that the outcome of this process can help in widening the scope of intelligent machine vision. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.