Spatial Attention and Saccadic Camera Motion

An important aspect of computer-controlled camera motion systems is that of the generation of saccadic movements, which shift the camera gaze quickly from one xation position to another. Recent psychophysi-cal experiments suggest that there exists a causal connection between spatial shifts in visual attention and the production of saccadic eye movements in humans. Motivated by this experimental evidence, we propose a winner-take-all based model of exogenous spatial attention , involving both sustained and transient feature detection channels, and link it to the targetting and triggering of saccadic eye movements. We show that this model accounts for a range of oculomotor phenomena observed in human subjects. We describe the application of this model to a robotic camera gaze control system.