Saliency prediction based on multi-channel models of visual processing

Visual attention is one of the most significant characteristics for selecting and understanding the outside redundancy world. The human vision system cannot process all information simultaneously due to the visual information bottleneck. In order to reduce the redundant input of visual information, the human visual system mainly focuses on dominant parts of scenes. This is commonly known as visual saliency map prediction. This paper proposed a new psychophysical oriented saliency prediction architecture, which inspired by multi-channel model of visual cortex functioning in humans. The model consists of opponent color channels, wavelet transform, wavelet energy map, and contrast sensitivity function for extracting low-level image features and providing a maximum approximation to the low-level human visual system. The proposed model is evaluated using several datasets, including the MIT1003, MIT300, TORONTO, SID4VAM, and UCF Sports datasets. We also quantitatively and qualitatively compare the saliency prediction performance with that of other state-of-the-art models. Our model achieved strongly stable and better performance with different metrics on natural images, psychophysical synthetic images and dynamic videos. Additionally, we suggested that Fourier and spectral-inspired saliency prediction models outperformed other state-of-the-art non-neural network and even deep neural network models on psychophysical synthetic images. In the meantime, we suggest that deep neural networks need specific architectures and goals to be able to predict salient performance on psychophysical synthetic images better and more reliably. Finally, the proposed model could be used as a computational model of primate low-level vision system and help us understand mechanism of primate low-level vision system.