@MASTERSTHESIS{schauerte2008multi-modale,
  author   = {B. Schauerte},
  title    = {{Multi-modale Aufmerksamkeitssteuerung in einer intelligenten Umgebung}},
  school   = {TU Dortmund, Robotics Research Institute},
  address  = {Dortmund},
  year     = {2008},
  month    = {September},
  type     = {Diplom Thesis},
  abstract = {Intelligent environments are supposed to simplify the everyday life of their
              users. To reach this target, a multitude of sensors is necessary to create a
              model of the current scene. The complete processing of the resulting sensor data
              stream can exceed the available processing capacities and inhibit the real-time
              processing of the complete sensor data. A possible solution to this problem is a
              fast pre-selection of potentially relevant sensor data and the restriction of
              complex calculations on the pre-selected sensor data. That leaves the question
              of what is potentially relevant.

              The topic of this thesis is the construction of a multi-modal attention control
              in an intelligent environment. Attention is the process of selectively
              concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Especially
              the human attention is intensily studied in psychology and cognitive
              neuroscience. For this reason the principles of the human attention are surveyed
              and transfered into the new application area.

              The basis is a 3-dimensional, multi-modal saliency model, which is constructed
              out of potentially relevant sensor data. This model is the base to transfer the
              two human mechanisms of attention into the intelligent environment: the act of
              mentally focusing on one of several possible sensory stimuli, the so-called
              covert attention, is realized as a selection of the sensor which is assumed to
              have the best perception of the scene; the act of directing sense organs towards
              a stimulus source, the so-called overt attention, is realized as a multi-camera,
              active-vision system which optimizes the visual scene perception and the
              3-dimensional saliency model.

              The attention control was implemented and evaluated in the practiceoriented
              intelligent environment FINCA at the Robotics Research Institute.}
}