BASED ON COLOR CUES : CO-OPERATIVE EFFECTS OF TOP-DOWN & BOTTOM-UP VISUAL ATTENTION

Focus of attention plays an important part in our perception of the world around us. Visual search is a combined effort of the top-down (cognitive cue) and bottom-up (low-level feature conspicuity) processes. Often during visual search our attention involuntarily gets directed to some irrelevant conspicuous objects, such as a bright object, regardless of the cued object. Objects that share similar characteristics with the cued object also influence our attention. In this paper we analyze the mechanism of visual search based on color cues in natural images as well as computer generated images. We demonstrate the characteristics of the visual scene search by tracing the focus of attention path using data from RIT’s human eye tracking system. The results are compared with the computer simulation results of our model in which we capture the interaction between the two systems and explain the behavioral dependencies. The top-down system is implemented using a neural network mimicking the working memory area of the brain and the bottom-up system is implemented using saliency maps.