Visual saliency: a biologically plausible contourlet-like frequency domain approach

In this paper we propose a fast frequency domain saliency detection method that is also biologically plausible, referred to as frequency domain divisive normalization (FDN). We show that the initial feature extraction stage, common to all spatial domain approaches, can be simplified to a Fourier transform with a contourlet-like grouping of coefficients, and saliency detection can be achieved in frequency domain. Specifically, we show that divisive normalization, a model of cortical surround inhibition, can be conducted in frequency domain. Since Fourier coefficients are global in space, we extend to this model by conducting piecewise FDN (PFDN) using overlapping local patches to provide better biological plausibility. Not only do FDN and PFDN outperform current state-of-the-art methods in eye fixation prediction, they are also faster. Speed and simplicity are advantages of our frequency domain approach, and its biological plausibility is the main contribution of our paper.