OpenCV 4 with Python Blueprints - Second Edition

Understanding visual saliency

Visual saliency is a technical term from cognitive psychology that tries to describe the visual quality of certain objects or items that allows them to grab our immediate attention. Our brains constantly drive our gaze toward the important regions of the visual scene and keep track of them over time, allowing us to quickly scan our surroundings for interesting objects and events while neglecting the less important parts.

An example of a regular RGB image and its conversion to a saliency map, where the statistically interesting pop-out regions appear bright and the others dark, is shown in the following screenshot:

Fourier analysis will enable us to get a general understanding of natural image statistics, which ...