An Experiment in Distributed Visual Attention

Attention mechanisms of biological vision have been applied to machine vision for several applications, like visual search and object detection. Most of the proposed models are centred on a unique way of attention, mainly stimulus-driven or bottom-up attention. We propose a visual attention system that integrates several attentional behaviours. To get a real-time implementation, we have designed a distributed software architecture that exhibits an efficient and flexible structure. We describe some implementation details and real experiments performed in a mobile robot endowed with a stereo vision head.