Stimuli Localization: An Integration Methodology Inspired by the Superior Colliculus for Audio and Visual Attention

Multiple Sensor fusion is important for human and animals to localize stimuli within an environment. Visual and audio sensors are often integrated to direct attention such as in human communication. The paper describes a methodology for designing and developing architecture to effectively localise simultaneous audio and visual stimuli by integrating both sensors. The Superior Colliculus (SC) inspired the architecture and it mimics the top and deep layers of the SC, as these layers are mainly responsible for visual and audio stimuli localization, respectively. The integration methodology described in this paper is evaluated against algorithmic-based methodology to determine effectiveness of the approach. Experimental results successfully demonstrate the key advantages in the integration, including (i) low-level multimodal stimuli localization and (ii) dimensionality reduction of the input-space without affecting stimuli strength and localization.