a biologically based model for recognition of 2d occluded patterns in this work we present a biologically inspired model for recognition of occluded patterns the general architecture of the model is based on the two visual information processing pathways of the human visual system ie the ventral and the dorsal pathways the proposed hierarchically structured model consists of three parallel processing channels the main channel learns invariant representations of the input patterns and is responsible for pattern recognition task but it is limited to process one pattern at a time the direct channel represents the biologically based direct connection from the lower to the higher processing level in the human visual cortex it computes rapid topdown patternspecific cues to modulate processing in the other two channels the spatial channel mimics the dorsal pathway of the visual cortex it generates a combined saliency map of the input patterns and later segments the part of the map representing the occluded pattern this segmentation process is based on our hypothesis that the dorsal pathway in addition to encoding spatial properties encodes the shape representations of the patterns as well the lateral interaction between the main and the spatial channels at appropriate processing levels and topdown patternspecific modulation of the these two channels by the direct channel strengthen the locations and features representing the occluded pattern consequently occluded patterns become focus of attention in the ventral channel and also the pattern selected for further processing along this channel for final recognition