Intermediate Vision: Architecture, Implementation, and Use

This article describes an implemented architecture for intermediate vision. By integrating a variety of intermediate visual mechanisms and putting them to use in support of concrete activity, the implementation demonstrates their utility. The sytem, SIVS, models psychophysical discoveries about visual attention and search. It is designed to be efficiently implementable in slow, massively parallel, locally connected hardware, such as that of the brain. SIVS addresses five fundamental problems. Visual attentlon is required to restrict processing to task-relevant locations in the image. Vfsual search finds such locations. Vlsuol routines are a means for nonuniform processing based on task demands. InfermedIate ob/ecfs keep track of intermediate results of this processing. Visual operators are a set of relatively abstract, general-purpose primitives for spatial analysis, out of which visual routines are assembled.