Patent ID: 8363939

Claim:
A vision system for object-based attention and segmentation, comprising a memory and one or more processors, the memory encoded with instructions to cause the system to include: a feature extraction module configured to receive an image representing a scene with an object in the scene and generate a feature map corresponding to receptive fields in the retina for red-center/green-surround, green-center/red-surround, blue-center/yellow-surround, bright-center/dark-surround, and dark-center/bright-surround; a feature edge detection module configured to extract edge information from the feature map and generate an edge map, the edge map including incomplete boundaries and unclosed contours; a watershed module configured to generate proto-objects based on the edge map; a saliency module configured to compute a saliency of each proto-object and rank the proto-objects relative to other proto-objects in terms of their saliency; and a region growing module configured to compute a feature boundary for the proto-object with the highest saliency and a list of pixels in the image that constitutes the proto-object feature boundary, and further configured to output the pixels confined by the feature boundary as an extracted object.