A Computational Perspective on Visual Attention

Although William James declared in 1890, "Everyone knows what attentionis," today there are many different and sometimes opposing views on the subject. Thisfragmented theoretical landscape may be because most of the theories and models of attention offerexplanations in natural language or in a pictorial manner rather than providing a quantitative andunambiguous statement of the theory. They focus on the manifestations of attention instead of itsrationale. In this book, John Tsotsos develops a formal model of visual attention with the goal ofproviding a theoretical explanation for why humans (and animals) must have the capacity to attend.He takes a unique approach to the theory, using the full breadth of the language ofcomputation--rather than simply the language of mathematics--as the formal means of description. Theresult, the Selective Tuning model of vision and attention, explains attentive behavior in humansand provides a foundation for building computer systems that see with human-like characteristics.The overarching conclusion is that human vision is based on a general purpose processor that can bedynamically tuned to the task and the scene viewed on a moment-by-moment basis. Tsotsos offers acomprehensive, up-to-date overview of attention theories and models and a full description of theSelective Tuning model, confining the formal elements to two chapters and two appendixes. The textis accompanied by more than 100 illustrations in black and white and color; additional colorillustrations and movies are available on the book's Web site

John K. Tsotsos is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science, Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision at York University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC).