A Computational Perspective on Visual Attention
John K. Tsotsos
The MIT Press
Although William James declared in 1890, "Everyone knows what                  attention is," today there are many different and sometimes opposing views on                  the subject. This fragmented theoretical landscape may be because most of the                  theories and models of attention offer explanations in natural language or in a                  pictorial manner rather than providing a quantitative and unambiguous statement of                  the theory. They focus on the manifestations of attention instead of its rationale.                  In this book, John Tsotsos develops a formal model of visual attention with the goal                  of providing a theoretical explanation for why humans (and animals) must have the                  capacity to attend. He takes a unique approach to the theory, using the full breadth                  of the language of computation--rather than simply the language of mathematics--as                  the formal means of description. The result, the Selective Tuning model of vision                  and attention, explains attentive behavior in humans and provides a foundation for                  building computer systems that see with human-like characteristics. The overarching                  conclusion is that human vision is based on a general purpose processor that can be                  dynamically tuned to the task and the scene viewed on a moment-by-moment basis.                  Tsotsos offers a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of attention theories and models                  and a full description of the Selective Tuning model, confining the formal elements                  to two chapters and two appendixes. The text is accompanied by more than 100                  illustrations in black and white and color; additional color illustrations and                  movies are available on the book's Web site