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Biologically-Inspired Visual Attention Models for Improved Sensing and Modeling

Dr. Ana-Maria Cretu

Associate Professor, Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University

November 23, 2017 9:00 - 10:30

Mackenzie Building Room 4332, Carleton University

Contact: Dr. James Green

Paid parking available on campus

abstract

The research community is experiencing nowadays a significant growth in the amount of data made available to several practical applications, particularly those dealing with visual information. The availability of large datasets poses critical challenges for the selection of only relevant features to allow their timely use and interpretation. The recent years marked an increasing interest in algorithms inspired from biological human vision as an alternative source of ideas for the development of computational resources to deal with large datasets. In particular, computational models of visual attention have been shown to significantly improve the speed of scene understanding and object recognition by attending only the regions of interest and distributing the resources where they are required. This talk explores the use and gauges the performance of visual attention mechanisms for assisting several tasks in the data sensing as well as in data interpretation and modeling. It describes the fundamentals of computational models of visual attention and their potential applications for data acquisition, for perceptually improved 3D object modeling in virtual environments and for the identification and classification of objects from images and tactile data.

biography

Ana-Maria Cretu obtained her M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Ottawa, Canada. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University. Her research interests include machine intelligence; machine learning, neural networks, biologically-inspired models; computational intelligence techniques for complex data and image processing; natural human-machine interaction; multimodal sensor systems for multisensory data acquisition; 3D deformable object acquisition, modeling and manipulation in virtualized reality environments; selective and attention-based sensing and modeling; and data mining. She is the author of more than 80 technical papers. She serves as Technical Committee Member for several international conferences, as conference organizer and as a reviewer for several Journals and Transactions. She is Associate Editor for the Springer Journal of Soft Computing, a Member of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society.