Efficient Semantic Understanding from Digital Foveation

The paper proposes a lightweight active‑vision pipeline that mimics biological foveation to perform semantic segmentation more efficiently. By selecting salient fixations, observing high‑resolution foveal patches, and using low‑resolution context, the method achieves 95.9% of baseline Top‑1 accuracy with only 4.7% of the computational cost, and recovers 90.6% of baseline object recall using 58.6% of the computation. The results demonstrate that sparse, selectively allocated observations can yield substantial semantic understanding, suggesting active vision as a viable alternative to uniform dense processing.