Chaotic phase synchronization for visual selection

Chaotic phase synchronization among coupled oscillators is a phenomenon of interest in many physical and engineering systems. It has also been observed in biological systems, where groups of different functional units interact with each other in order to produce coherent behaviors in higher levels. While biological systems have facility to capture salient object(s) in a given scene, visual selection is still a challenging task to artificial visual systems. In this paper, a visual selection mechanism based on chaotic phase synchronization is proposed. Oscillators representing the salient object in a given scene are phase synchronized, while no synchronization is observed for background objects. In this way, the salient object is highlighted. Due to the modeling by phase synchronization instead of complete synchronization, the proposed model is robust, biologically inspired and good simulation results were achieved.