Does a Plane Imitate a Bird? Does Computer Vision Have to Follow Biological Paradigms?

Abstract

We posit a new paradigm for image information processing. For the last 25 years, this task was usually approached in the frame of Treisman's two-stage paradigm [1]. The latter supposes an unsupervised, bottom-up directed process of preliminary information pieces gathering at the lower processing stages and a supervised, top-down directed process of information pieces binding and grouping at the higher stages. It is acknowledged that these sub-processes interact and intervene between them in a tricky and a complicated manner. Notwithstanding the prevalence of this paradigm in biological and computer vision, we nevertheless propose to replace it with a new one, which we would like to designate as a two-part paradigm. In it, information contained in an image is initially extracted in an independent top-down manner by one part of the system, and then it is examined and interpreted by another, separate system part. We argue that the new paradigm seems to be more plausible than its forerunner. We provide evidence from human attention vision studies and insights of Kolmogorov's complexity theory to support our arguments. We also provide some reasons in favor of separate image interpretation issues.