An Information Theoretic Model of Spatiotemporal Visual Saliency

This paper presents a principled and practical method for the computation of visual saliency of spatiotemporal events in full motion videos. Based on the assumption that uniqueness or informative-ness correlates with saliency, our model predicts the saliency of a spatiotemporal event based on the information it contains. To compute the uniqueness of the spatiotemporal events, we model the joint spatial and temporal conditional probability distributions of the spatiotemporal events and compute their spatiotemporal saliencies in a natural and integrated framework. To make the information theoretic model practical, we have developed methods to simplify the model and computational process. Testing results on several video sequences demonstrate that our model is effective in predicting visually salient spatiotemporal events and is comparable to state of the art. It is expected that our principled and practical model will find widespread applications in multimedia content analysis and processing.