Visual Saliency is the capability of vision system to select distinctive parts of scene and reduce the amount of visual data that need to be processed.
arxiv.org/abs/1607.03021
Visual salience (or visual saliency) is the distinct subjective perceptual quality which makes some items in the world stand out from their neighbors and immediately grab our attention.
scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_salience
Saliency is a kind of image segmentation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saliency_map
The term saliency has been used in different contexts, but tends to mean «interestingness».
For example, green squares on a black background have a high saliency, but the one red square among them has an even higher saliency.
In addition, a square moving through an otherwise still scene is very salient.
pygaze.org/2018/05/saliency-mapping-taylor-swift
Until recently, most computer vision algorithms have relied on brute-force, systematic scanning of images from left-to-right and top-to bottom when attempting to locate objects of interest.
Visual salience provides a relatively inexpensive and rapid mechanism to select a few likely candidates and eliminate obvious clutter (Itti & Koch, 2000; Navalpakkam & Itti, 2005).
Applications of computational models of visual salience include, among many others:
- Automatic target detection (e.g., finding traffic signs along the road or military vehicles in a savanna; Itti & Koch, 2000);
- Robotics (using salient objects in the environment as navigation landmarks; Frintrop et al., 2006; Siagian & Itti, 2007);
- Image and video compression (e.g., giving higher quality to salient objects at the expense of degrading background clutter; Maeder et al., 1996; Itti, 2004);
- Automatic cropping/centering of images for display on small portable screens (Le Meur et al., 2006);
- Finding tumors in mammograms (Hong & Brady, 2003);
scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_salience