Extraction of saliency in images and video: Problems, methods and applications. A survey

Rather than meeting the theoretical, methodological and applicative expectancies, the impressing number of state-of-the-art saliency oriented studies raises new fundamental questions about the very nature of this psycho-cognitive process. Such questions encompass fundamental modeling aspects from the very saliency dependency on the representation format to its potential relationship to other fundamental research areas, like information theory, for instance. The present survey, structured according to three main saliency applicative fields (visual quality evaluation, watermarking and task-oriented computer vision) is meant to identify the latest trends of research.