%0 Journal Article %T Attentional Mechanisms for Interactive Image Exploration %A Machrouh Joseph %A Tarroux Philippe %J EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing %D 2005 %I Springer %X A lot of work has been devoted to content-based image retrieval from large image databases. The traditional approaches are based on the analysis of the whole image content both in terms of low-level and semantic characteristics. We investigate in this paper an approach based on attentional mechanisms and active vision. We describe a visual architecture that combines bottom-up and top-down approaches for identifying regions of interest according to a given goal. We show that a coarse description of the searched target combined with a bottom-up saliency map provides an efficient way to find specified targets on images. The proposed system is a first step towards the development of software agents able to search for image content in image databases. %K exploratory vision %K bottom-up exploration %K top-down exploration %K attention %K situated vision %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2391