Robot task-driven attention

Visual attention is a crucial skill in human beings in that it allows optimal deployment of visual processing and memory resources. It turns out to be even more useful in search tasks, since to select salient zones we use top-down priors, depending on the observed scene, along with bottom-up criteria. In this paper we show how we constructed a robotic model of attention, inspired by studies on human attention and gaze shifting. Our model relies on a measure of salience related to the particular type of environment and to the given task. This measure is hierarchically structured and consists of both top-down components, learned from the tutor, and bottom-up components as perceived in the scene by the robot. Hence with such a general model the robot can perform its own scan-path inside a similar environment and report on its findings. Copyright © held by author