Selective Visual Attention: Computational Models and Applications

9.2 Further Discussions

It is known that saliency map models are based on biological hypotheses about visual search such as FIT and GS theories. With the development of psychophysics, psychology and neuroscience, some existing biological hypotheses and conclusions face challenges. A review paper [8] in 2006, based on the experiments and ideas of many experts from various aspects of visual search, listed four controversial issues to discuss the theories: the role of bottom-up and top-down mechanism, the role of memory mechanism, the implementation of these mechanism in the brain and the simulation of visual search in neuronal computational models. Although the discussion is in the pure biological area, it still influences the development of computational models of visual attention. Since computational models introduced here are closely related to biological facts, each progress in biology will lead to change and improvement of the computational models. Besides, many unclear issues in visual information processing of the high-level cortex often have impact in the engineering area. This section collects nine controversial issues related to the content in this book, in the intersection area of biological and engineering, and we hope that these can stimulate further discussions and also serve as the reference and starting point in future development of new saliency map models.

9.2.1 Interaction between Top-down Control and Bottom-up Processing in Visual Search

It is known from FIT that ...