Real-time visual saliency architecture for FPGA with top-down attention modulation

Abstract

Biological vision uses attention to reduce the visual bandwidth simplifying the higher-level processing. This paper presents a model and its hardware real-time architecture in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to be integrated in a robotic system that emulates this powerful biological process. It is based on the combination of bottom-up saliency and top-down task-dependent modulation. The bottom-up stream is deployed including local energy,