An attentive, multi-modal laser "eye"

In this paper we present experimental results on a novel application of visual attention mechanisms for the selection of points of interest in an arbitrary scene. The imaging sensor used is a multi-modal 3D laser scanner. In a single 3D scan pass, it is capable of providing range data as well as a gray-scale intensity image. The scanner is mounted on top of an autonomous mobile robot and serves control purposes. We present results achieved by applying the visual attention system of Itti et al. [8] to recorded scans of indoor and outdoor scenes. The vast majority of the primary attended locations pointed to scene objects of potential interest for navigation and object detection tasks. Moreover, both sensor modalities complement each other, resulting in a greater variety of points of interest than one modality alone can provide.