Small and dim target detection via lateral inhibition filtering and Artificial Bee colony based selective visual attention

PLoS One. 2013 Aug 21;8(8):e72035. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0072035. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

This paper proposed a novel bionic selective visual attention mechanism to quickly select regions that contain salient objects to reduce calculations. Firstly, lateral inhibition filtering, inspired by the limulus' ommateum, is applied to filter low-frequency noises. After the filtering operation, we use Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm based selective visual attention mechanism to obtain the interested object to carry through the following recognition operation. In order to eliminate the camera motion influence, this paper adopted ABC algorithm, a new optimization method inspired by swarm intelligence, to calculate the motion salience map to integrate with conventional visual attention. To prove the feasibility and effectiveness of our method, several experiments were conducted. First the filtering results of lateral inhibition filter were shown to illustrate its noise reducing effect, then we applied the ABC algorithm to obtain the motion features of the image sequence. The ABC algorithm is proved to be more robust and effective through the comparison between ABC algorithm and popular Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. Except for the above results, we also compared the classic visual attention mechanism and our ABC algorithm based visual attention mechanism, and the experimental results of which further verified the effectiveness of our method.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Attention / physiology*
  • Bees / physiology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Feasibility Studies
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Models, Biological
  • Motion
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods
  • Visual Perception / physiology*

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant #61273054, #60975072 and #60604009, National Key Basic Research Program of China under grant #2013CB035503, National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) under grant #2011AA040902, Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China under grant #NCET-10-0021, Top-Notch Young Talents Program of China under grant #2012, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under grant #YWF-12-LZGF-059, and Innovation Foundation of BUAA for PhD Graduates under grant #302953. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.