A non-myopic approach to visual search

Abstract

We show how a greedy approach to visual search - i.e., directly moving to the most likely location of the target - can be suboptimal, if the target object is hard to detect. Instead it is more efficient and leads to higher detection accuracy to first look for other related objects, that are easier to detect. These provide contextual priors for the target that make it easier to find. We demonstrate this in simulation using POMDP models, focussing on two special cases: where the target object is contained within the related object, and where the target object is spatially adjacent to the related object.