Neurocomputing 56 (2004) 475–480 www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom Letters A face detection using biologically motivated bottom-up saliency map model and top-down perception model Sang-Woo Ban a , Minho Lee a ; ∗ , Hyun-Seung Yang b a School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sankyuk-Dong, Puk-Gu, Taegu 702-701, South Korea b Department of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1 Kusong-Dong, Yusong-Gu, Taejon 305-701, South Korea Abstract We propose a new biologically motivated face detection model. The proposed model integrates a bottom-up mechanism for extracting features to obtain salient information and a top-down per- ceptual mechanism for perceiving face features such as face form and face color. We constructed a face conspicuity map by binding the bottom-up process and the top-down process that consists of face form and color feature maps. Computer experimental results show that the proposed model successfully indicates faces in natural scenes. c  2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Saliency map; Selective attention; Bottom-up visual attention; Top-down perception; Face detection 1. Introduction The human visual system can eortlessly detect an interesting object in natural or cluttered scenes through the selective attention mechanism. Considering the human-like selective attention function, top-down or task-dependent processing can aect how to determine the saliency map (SM) as well as bottom-up or task-independent pro- cessing. In the top-down manner, the human visual system determines salient loca- tions through perceptive processing such as understanding and recognition. On the * Corresponding author. Tel.: +82-53-950-6436; fax: +82-53-950-5505. E-mail address: mholee@knu.ac.kr (M. Lee). 0925-2312/$ - see front matter c  2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2003.10.003