Congratulations to Craig Bennett for successfully passing his PhD viva

Friday 8 February 2008

"Our perception is finite limited by both sensory capacity and the ability to interpret stimulation. Therefore, in order that an environment may best be understood there is a need to be selective in how resources, both computational and sensory, are deployed; this selective mechanism is often termed attention. In this thesis a model of visual attention is described which may be specialised to detect targets of interest. Specifically, we explore how a target's signal may be differentiated from other stimulation in a visual input through developing a knowledge of its expected appearance with respect a basic set of features. A key question we address is: how the separate sources of information provided by the processing of each feature type may be best be combined to provide a map of target saliency across a scene. This saliency index is then used to guide the deployment of attention."