Two models of visual attention which are consistent with human visual perception are introduced. Based on these two models, an ATR algorithm employing attention mechanisms with bottom-up and top-down control strategies is developed. A multi-channel representation of the input image was obtained by a bank of Gabor filters, corresponding to multiple scales and multiple orientations. Full-wave rectification of each channel and contrast gain control among the channels were performed sequentially to get orientation feature maps with multiple scales and multiple orientations. The so-called salient map was the linear combination of these orientation feature maps. The experimental result with ship detection is given by use of bottom-up control strategy only. The objects for detection are effectively enhanced on the result map.