Attention mechanisms for vision in a dynamic world

Three elements of attention in computer vision are described. These are related to familiar aspects of eye movement control in human vision: foveation, to examine selected regions of the visual world at high resolution; tracking, to stabilize the images of moving objects within the eye; and high-level interpretation, to anticipate where salient information will occur in a scene. Attention mechanisms allow the system to function in a data-rich world by directing system sensing and analysis resources to only that information critical to the system´s current visual task. It is concluded that attention therefore includes mechanisms for directing the allocation of processing and mechanisms for rapidly interpreting the information as it is gathered