Spatiotemporal saliency: Towards a hierarchical representation of visual saliency

Abstract

In prior work, we put forth a model of visual saliency motivated by information theoretic considerations [1]. In this effort we consider how this proposal extends to explain saliency in the spatiotemporal domain and further, propose a distributed representation for visual saliency comprised of localized hierarchical saliency computation. Evidence for the efficacy of the proposal in capturing aspects of human behavior is achieved via comparison with eye tracking data and a discussion of the role of neural coding in the determination of saliency suggests avenues for future research. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.