Visual attention based model for target detection in large-field images

It is of great significance to rapidly detect targets in large-field remote sensing images,with limited computation resources.Employing relative achievements of visual attention in perception psychology,this paper proposes a hierarchical attention based model for target detection.Specifically,at the preattention stage,before getting salient regions,a fast computational approach is applied to build a saliency map.After that,the focus of attention(FOA) can be quickly obtained to indicate the salient objects.Then,at the attention stage,under the FOA guidance,the high-level visual features of the region of interest are extracted in parallel.Finally,at the post-attention stage,by integrating these parallel and independent visual attributes,a decision-template based classifier fusion strategy is proposed to discriminate the task-related targets from the other extracted salient objects.For comparison,experiments on ship detection are done for validating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model.