"Inhibitory Surround and Grouping Effects in Human and Computational Multiple Object Tracking"
O. Yilmaz, S. Guler, H. Ogmen.
SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference, Visualization and Perception, January, 2008, San Jose, CA, USA
O. Yilmaz and H. Ogmen are with University of Houston, Department of Electrical and Computer Eng. Houston, TX Center for Neuro-Engineering and Cognitive Science
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) experiments show that human observers can track over several seconds up to five moving targets among several moving distractors. We extended these studies by designing modified MOT experiments to investigate the spatio-temporal characteristics of human visuo-cognitive mechanisms for tracking and applied the findings and insights obtained from these experiments in designing computational multiple object tracking algorithms. Recent studies indicate that attention both enhances the neural activity of relevant information and suppresses the irrelevant visual information in the surround. Results of our experiments suggest that the suppressive surround of attention extends up to 4 deg from the target stimulus, and it takes at least 100 ms to build it. We suggest that when the attentional windows corresponding to separate target regions are spatially close, they can be grouped to form a single attentional window to avoid interference originating from suppressive surrounds. The grouping experiment results indicate that the attentional windows are grouped into a single one when the distance between them is less than 1.5 deg. Preliminary implementation of the suppressive surround concept in our computational video analysis object tracker resulted in fewer unnecessary object merges in computational video tracking experiments.