Visual saliency based on natural scene statistics

Visual saliency is the perceptual quality that makes some items in visual scenes stand out from their immediate contexts. According to the center-surround hypothesis of saliency, it is commonly assumed that bottom-up saliency is determined by how distinct the stimulus (features) at each location of the visual field is from the stimuli (features) in its surround. Using the center-surround configuration from different scales, we define the saliency measure based on the conditional probability of the center given the surround, which is obtained from natural scene statistics (collected from a large set of images of natural scenes). It is demonstrated that the proposed model of visual saliency predicts well human gaze in free viewing static natural scenes.