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Summary, Further Discussions and Conclusions
Visual attention is of importance in both biological and engineering areas. The goal of most research on visual attention related to this book is to construct a model that can simulate the visual attention mechanism in human or animal brains and to derive an algorithm for engineering applications. Different kinds of visual attention models or algorithms have been proposed during the past few decades in both biological and engineering areas. However, the focal points of the studies in the two areas are different.
Biologists and psychologists are more interested in understanding the human perceptual capability. In the studies of anatomy and physiology, the human visual system has clearly been revealed, especially in terms of the information processing from the retina to the primary visual cortex V1 area; however, there are still many controversial and unclear issues such as how searching for required objects in the visual field happens in human brains, how visual attention is performed in the brain and so on. Some hypotheses and theories have been suggested by physiologists and psychologists to predict visual attention in the brain, and these have been validated in many biological experiments by measuring the cell activity in animal brains and in some psychological experiments with human observers by displaying man-made visual paradigms. Feature integration theory (FIT) [1], guided search (GS) [2, 3] and synchronized oscillation theory ...
