Using a Saliency Map for Active Spatial Selective Attention: Implementation & Initial Results

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 7 (NIPS 1994)

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Authors

Shumeet Baluja, Dean A. Pomerleau

Abstract

In many vision based tasks, the ability to focus attention on the important portions of a scene is crucial for good performance on the tasks. In this paper we present a simple method of achieving spatial selective attention through the use of a saliency map. The saliency map indicates which regions of the input retina are important for performing the task. The saliency map is cre(cid:173) ated through predictive auto-encoding. The performance of this method is demonstrated on two simple tasks which have multiple very strong distract(cid:173) ing features in the input retina. Architectural extensions and application directions for this model are presented.