Saliency in images and video: a brief survey

Salient image regions permit non-uniform allocation of computational resources. The selection of a commensurate set of salient regions is often a step taken in the initial stages of many computer vision algorithms, thereby facilitating object recognition, visual search and image matching. In this study, the authors survey the role and advancement of saliency algorithms over the past decade. The authors first offer a concise introduction to saliency. Next, the authors present a summary of saliency literature cast into their respective categories then further differentiated by their domains, computational methods, features, context and use of scale. The authors then discuss the achievements and limitations of the current state of the art. This information is augmented by an outline of the datasets and performance measures utilised as well as the computational techniques pervasive in the literature.