Visual routines and attention
Satyajit Rao, Patrick Henry Winston, Rodney A. Brooks · 1998
The human visual system solves an amazing range of problems in the course of everyday activities. Without conscious effort, the human visual system finds a place on the table to put down a cup, selects the shortest checkout queue in a grocery store, looks for moving vehicles before we cross a road, and checks to see if the stoplight has turned green. Inspired by the human visual system, I have developed a model of vision, with special emphasis on visual attention. In this thesis, I explain that model and exhibit programs based on that model that: 1. Extract a wide variety of spatial relations on demand. 2. Learn visuospatial patterns of activity from experience. For example, one program determines what object a human is pointing to. Another learns a particular pattern of visual activity evoked whenever an object falls off a table. The program that extracts spatial relations on demand uses sequences of primitive oper-ations called visual routines. The primitive operations in the visual routines fall into one of three families: operations for moving the focus of attention; operations for establishing