Examining visual saliency prediction in naturalistic scenes

Given the significant number of potential applications, visual saliency has increasingly become an area of interest in image and vision research. Many different strategies for predicting visual saliency have been proposed, that differ in their composition or rationale, and with a significant focus on improving performance across standard benchmarks. Recent benchmarks considering a large number of algorithms have further provided an understanding of the behavior of different algorithms. Performance evaluation has primarily focused on indoor and outdoor images of urban environments, many of which are composed, and contain salient objects. In this work, we test the performance of a number of the better performing algorithms on data derived from naturalistic scenes. In addition, given the strong connection to human vision, we test a putative model for early visual processing in primates tied to spectral energy and normalization. Results demonstrate significant differences between common datasets, and natural images. Performance analysis of the second-order contrast model also provides additional insight concerning the role of spectral energy in determining saliency. Finally we include analysis that demonstrates statistical properties of images that tend to imply common gaze patterns across observers.