Evolving an artificial dorsal stream on purpose for visual attention

Visual attention is a natural process performed by the brain, whose functionality is to perceive salient visual features, and which is necessary since it is impossible to focus your sight at two things during the same indivisible time. This work is devoted to the task of evolving visual attention programs through organic genetic programming. The idea is to state the problem of visual attention, which is normally divided in two parts: bottom-up and top-down, in terms of a unique approach based on a teleological framework. Indeed, this paper explains how visual attention could be understood as a single mechanism that is designed according to a given purpose. In this way, genetic programming is used to design top-notch visual attention programs. Experimental results show that this new approach can contrive solutions useful in the solution of top-down and bottom-up visual attention problems. In particular, we present a solution to the size popout problem that was unsolved previously in the literature. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.