Biological plausibility of spectral domain approach for spatiotemporal visual saliency

Abstract

We provide a biological justification for the success of spectral domain models of visual attention and propose a refined spectral domain based spatiotemporal saliency map model including a more biologically plausible method for motion saliency generation. We base our approach on the idea of spectral whitening (SW), and show that this whitening process is an estimation of divisive normalization, a model of lateral surround inhibition. Experimental results reveal that SW is a better performer at predicating eye fixation locations than other state-of-the-art spatial domain models for color images, achieving a 92% consistency with human behavior in urban environments. In addition, the model is simple and fast, capable of generating saliency maps in real-time. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.