A developmental model of audio-visual attention (MAVA) for bimodal language learning in infants and robots

A social individual needs to effectively manage the amount of complex information in his or her environment relative to his or her own purpose to obtain relevant information. This paper presents a neural architecture aiming to reproduce attention mechanisms (alerting/orienting/selecting) that are efficient in humans during audiovisual tasks in robots. We evaluated the system based on its ability to identify relevant sources of information on faces of subjects emitting vowels. We propose a developmental model of audio-visual attention (MAVA) combining Hebbian learning and a competition between saliency maps based on visual movement and audio energy. MAVA effectively combines bottom-up and top-down information to orient the system toward pertinent areas. The system has several advantages, including online and autonomous learning abilities, low computation time and robustness to environmental noise. MAVA outperforms other artificial models for detecting speech sources under various noise conditions.