The Gabor decomposition is a ubiquitous tool in computer vision. Nevertheless, it is generally considered computationally demanding for active vision applications. We suggest an attention-driven approach to feature detection inspired by the human saccadic system. A dramatic speedup is achieved by computing the Gabor decomposition only on the points of a sparse retinotopic grid. An off-line eye detection application and a real-time head localisation and tracking system are presented. The real-time system features a novel eyeball-mounted camera designed to simulate the dynamic performance of the human eye and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first example of active vision system based on the Gabor decomposition.