A Modular Model of Active Vision

Abstract

Modularity is the main characteristic of the biological systems and especially of the brain [2]. For example, Vision can be described as the interactions of different processing systems [1]. Physiologists relate two pathways from the retina. The first conveys information from the retina to the cortical areas, where specialized areas analyse the visual data (e.g., colour vision, motion detection, object recognition and localization) . The second joins the retina to the superior colliculus, which sends motor signals to extraocular neurons (e.g., saccade from one important zone in the visual world to another one). We described a biologically inspired connectionist model of the visual system. Neural networks, despite their ability to solve a lot of hard problems, are rarely modular. Connectionist models usually do not take into account eye movement informations underlying the attentional processes [5], except a recent study on reading [10]. On the contrary, our system involved three module..