Pop-out and IOR in Static Scenes with Region Based Visual Attention

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach to construct the saliency map by combining region-based maps of distinct features. The multiplication style feature fusion process in the natural visual attention is modelled as weighted average of the features under influence of the external top-down and the internal bottom-up inhibitions. The recently discovered aspect of feature-based inhibition is also included in the procedure of IOR along with the commonly implemented spatial and feature-map based inhibitions. Results obtained from the proposed method are compatible with the well known attention models but with the advantages of faster computation, direct usability of focus of attention in machine vision, and broader coverage of visually prominent objects.