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Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society
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NLOOK: a computational attention model for robot vision

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 15, pages3–17(2009)Cite this article

Abstract

The computational models of visual attention, originally proposed as cognitive models of human attention, nowadays are being used as front-ends to some robotic vision systems, like automatic object recognition and landmark detection. However, these kinds of applications have different requirements from those originally proposed. More specifically, a robotic vision system must be relatively insensitive to 2D similarity transforms of the image, as in-plane translations, rotations, reflections and scales, and it should also select fixation points in scale as well as position. In this paper a new visual attention model, called NLOOK, is proposed. This model is validated through several experiments, which show that it is less sensitive to 2D similarity transforms than other two well known and publicly available visual attention models: NVT and SAFE. Besides, NLOOK can select more accurate fixations than other attention models, and it can select the scales of fixations, too. Thus, the proposed model is a good tool to be used in robot vision systems.

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Affiliations

  1. Informatics Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves 9500, Agronomia, P.O. Box 15064, 91501-970, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
    • Milton Roberto Heinen
    •  & Paulo Martins Engel
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Heinen, M.R., Engel, P.M. NLOOK: a computational attention model for robot vision. J Braz Comp Soc 15, 3–17 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03194502

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Keywords

  • robot vision
  • visual attention
  • selective attention
  • focus of attention
  • biomimetic vision