Saliency detection via textural contrast

We present a new approach for visual saliency detection from various natural images. It is inspired by our careful observation that the human visual system (HVS) responds sensitively and quickly to high textural contrast, derived from the discriminative directional pattern from its surroundings as well as the noticeable luminance difference, for understanding a given scene. By formulating such textural contrast within a multiscale framework, we construct a more reliable saliency map even without color information when compared to most previous approaches still suffering from the complex and cluttered background. The proposed method has been extensively tested on a wide range of natural images, and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is effective in detecting visual saliency compared to various state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America