<title>Attentive sensing strategy for a multiwindow vision architecture</title>

Abstract

A multi-window video architecture is a unique coarse-grained multiprocessor implementation used for image processing. Such an architecture consists of many local rectangular regions (windows) that are processed in parallel by individual processing units. The architecture provides many windows, whose position, size, shape and sampling rate are individually controllable. Each window captures image data into its own local memory, so image memory contention is eliminated. The motivation behind multi-windowing stems from the fact that there is often an excess of information in an image; we usually are only interested in a few objects that require further processing. By performing the processing in parallel only within windows, processing speeds are greatly increased.A key problem in multi-windowing is how to automatically assign windows to the relevant objects within an image. In order to address this problem, we introduce a strategy that models itself closely to the human attention ability, therefore we refer to it as an attentive sensing strategy. The attentive sensing strategy is carried out in two stages. The first 'pre-attent.ive' stage consists of several parallel processing units which rapidly extract salient information in parallel across the entire image. The second stage, termed 'attentive sensing', consists of a distribution of focused sensory processing on only the salient objects in the image. Information gathered by the pre-attentive stage guides the processing of the attentive stage, resulting in the elimination of irrelevant information. We carry out this sensing strategy on a multi-windowing vision system designed and built for the inspection of integrated circuit wafers.

<title>Use of color in integrated-circuit inspection</title>

“…Use of Intelligent Sensing: An inspection methodology using intelligent sensing has been developed, taking advantage of the multi-window capture capability of the hardware [13,14]. The methodology is based on intelligent sensing or skilled perception [26] where defects are not only detected but also interpreted.…”

“…We will first briefly discuss these three points, and then describe in detail the use of color in integrated circuit inspection. Detailed descriptions of the hardware and the intelligent sensing strategy used by the system can be found elsewhere [11,12,13,14]. …”