  Visual priming is known to affect the human visual system to allow detection
of scene elements, even those that may have been near unnoticeable before, such
as the presence of camouflaged animals. This process has been shown to be an
effect of top-down signaling in the visual system triggered by the said cue. In
this paper, we propose a mechanism to mimic the process of priming in the
context of object detection and segmentation. We view priming as having a
modulatory, cue dependent effect on layers of features within a network. Our
results show how such a process can be complementary to, and at times more
effective than simple post-processing applied to the output of the network,
notably so in cases where the object is hard to detect such as in severe noise.
Moreover, we find the effects of priming are sometimes stronger when early
visual layers are affected. Overall, our experiments confirm that top-down
signals can go a long way in improving object detection and segmentation.
