Visual attention is a process by which the Human Visual System (HVS) selects most important information from a scene. Visual attention models are computational or mathematical models developed to predict this information. The performance of the state-of-the-art visual attention models is limited in terms of prediction accuracy and computational complexity. In spite of significant amount of active research in this area, modelling visual attention is still an open research challenge. This thesis proposes a novel computational model of visual attention that achieves higher prediction accuracy with low computational complexity. A new bottom-up visual attention model based on in-focus regions is proposed. To develop the model, an image dataset is created by capturing images with in-focus and out-of-focus regions. The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) spectrum of these images is investigated qualitatively and quantitatively to discover the key frequency coefficients that correspond to the in-focus regions. The model detects these key coefficients by formulating a novel relation between the in-focus and out-of-focus regions in the frequency domain. These frequency coefficients are used to detect the salient in-focus regions. The simulation results show that this attention model achieves good prediction accuracy with low complexity. The prediction accuracy of the proposed in-focus visual attention model is further improved by incorporating sensitivity of the HVS towards the image centre and the human faces. Moreover, the computational complexity is further reduced by using Integer Cosine Transform (ICT). The model is parameter tuned using the hill climbing approach to optimise the accuracy. The performance has been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using two large image datasets with eye tracking fixation ground truth. The results show that the model achieves higher prediction accuracy with a lower computational complexity compared to the state-of-the-art visual attention models. The proposed model is useful in predicting human fixations in computationally constrained environments. Mainly it is useful in applications such as perceptual video coding, image quality assessment, object recognition and image segmentation.

[pt] Nesta tese, propomos novas arquiteturas para redes neurais profundas utlizando métodos de atenção e álgebra multilinear para aumentar seu desempenho. Também exploramos convoluções em grafos e suas particularidades. Nos concentramos aqui em problemas relacionados à estimativa de pose em tempo real. A estimativa de pose é um problema desafiador em visão computacional com muitas aplicações reais em áreas como realidade aumentada, realidade virtual, animação por computador e reconstrução de cenas 3D. Normalmente, o problema a ser abordado envolve estimar a pose humana 2D ou 3D, ou seja, as partes do corpo de pessoas em imagens ou vídeos, bem como seu posicionamento e estrutura. Diveros trabalhos buscam atingir alta precisão usando arquiteturas baseadas em redes neurais de convolução convencionais; no entanto, erros causados por oclusão e motion blur não são incomuns, e ainda esses modelos são computacionalmente pesados para aplicações em tempo real. Exploramos diferentes arquiteturas para melhorar o tempo de processamento destas redes e, como resultado, propomos dois novos modelos de rede neural para estimativa de pose 2D e 3D. Também apresentamos uma nova arquitetura para redes de atenção em grafos chamada de atenção em grafos semânticos. / [en] This thesis proposes new architectures for deep neural networks with attention enhancement and multilinear algebra methods to increase their performance. We also explore graph convolutions and their particularities. We focus here on the problems related to real-time pose estimation. Pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision with many real applications in areas including augmented reality, virtual reality, computer animation, and 3D scene reconstruction. Usually, the problem to be addressed involves estimating the 2D and 3D human pose, i.e., the anatomical keypoints or body parts of persons in images or videos. Several papers propose approaches to achieve high accuracy using architectures based on conventional convolution neural networks; however, mistakes caused by occlusion and motion blur are not uncommon, and those models are computationally very intensive for real-time applications. We explore different architectures to improve processing time, and, as a result, we propose two novel neural network models for 2D and 3D pose estimation. We also introduce a new architecture for Graph attention networks called Semantic Graph Attention.