Evolutionary design of context-free attentional operators

A framework for simulating the visual attention system in primates is presented. Each stage of the attentional hierarchy is chosen with consideration for both psychophysics and mathematical optimality. A set of attentional operators are derived that act on basic image channels of intensity, hue, and orientation to produce maps representing perceptual importance of each image pixel. The development of such operators is realized within the context of a genetic optimization. The model includes the notion of an information domain where feature maps are transformed to a domain that more closely represents the response one might expect from the human visual system. The model is applied to a number of natural images to assess its efficacy in predicting guidance of attention in arbitrary natural scenes.