Auditory modulation of visual proto-object formation in a hierarchical auditory-visual saliency map

Organisms use the process of selective attention to optimally allocate their computational resources to interesting subsets of a visual scene - ensuring that they can parse the scene in realtime. Many models of attention assume that basic image features (e.g. intensity, color and orientation) behave as attractors for attention. Gestalt psychologists, however, argue that humans perceive the whole before they analyze individual features. This is supported by recent psychophysical studies that show that objects predict eye-fixations better than features. In this paper we present a neurally inspired algorithm of object based, bottom up attention. In this paper we extend the original object-based visual saliency map using border ownership to include auditory integration. The integration is implemented using the modulation of the receptive field for border ownership in the process of protoobject formation. We report on preliminary experimental results from our model using data from two types of objects, people and cars.