WCAA Invited Talk: Prof. Dr. Laurent Itti, University of Southern California, USA
Title of the Talk
Combined Top-down and Bottom-up Attentional Guidance
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Abstract
Visual processing of complex natural environments requires animals to combine, in a highly dynamic and adaptive manner, sensory signals that originate from the environment (bottom-up) with behavioral goals and priorities dictated by the task at hand (top-down). In the visual domain, bottom-up and top-down guidance of attention towards salient or behaviorally relevant targets have both been studied and modeled extensively. However, much remains to be understood of how these two very different sources of information may combine to yield unitized behavior. In this talk, I will describe recent efforts in our laboratory which focus on this information integration problem. On the one hand, I will describe experimental studies with humans and monkeys watching natural video stimuli, which aim at better disentangling the respective contributions of bottom-up and top-down influences on attentional and gaze allocation. On the other hand, I will also describe recent modeling efforts which attempt both to capture top-down effects computationally, and to integrate them with bottom-up saliency signals.
About the speaker
Prof. Dr. Laurent Itti studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris where he recieved his MS in Image Processing in 1994. In 2000 he recieved his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech. Currently, Prof. Dr. Itti holds the position of an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California.
