3 State of the Art of Computational Attention Systems

The increased interest on research on visual attention together with the increased power of computers and the resulting ability to realize complex computer vision systems has led to a wide variety of computational systems on visual attention. In this chapter, we will review the most influential work in this field. We already considered models of visual attention in the previous chapter. Although several of them are also implemented computationally, their focus is on the psychological aspect of visual attention more than on the technical aspect: the models of the previous chapter try to explain and better understand human perception whereas the systems in this chapter usually have the aim to improve vision systems for applications in computer vision and robotics.