Salience (neuroscience) | EPFL Graph Search

Salience (also called saliency) is that property by which some thing stands out. Salient events are an attentional mechanism by which organisms learn and survive; those organisms can focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the pertinent (that is, salient) subset of the sensory data available to them. Saliency typically arises from contrasts between items and their neighborhood. They might be represented, for example, by a red dot surrounded by white dots, or by a flickering message indicator of an answering machine, or a loud noise in an otherwise quiet environment. Saliency detection is often studied in the context of the visual system, but similar mechanisms operate in other sensory systems. Just what is salient can be influenced by training: for example, for human subjects particular letters can become salient by training. There can be a sequence of necessary events, each of which has to be salient, in turn, in order for successful training in the sequence; the alternative is a failure, as in an illustrated sequence when tying a bowline; in the list of illustrations, even the first illustration is a salient: the rope in the list must cross over, and not under the bitter end of the rope (which can remain fixed, and not free to move); failure to notice that the first salient has not been satisfied means the knot will fail to hold, even when the remaining salient events have been satisfied. When attention deployment is driven by salient stimuli, it is considered to be bottom-up, memory-free, and reactive. Conversely, attention can also be guided by top-down, memory-dependent, or anticipatory mechanisms, such as when looking ahead of moving objects or sideways before crossing streets. Humans and other animals have difficulty paying attention to more than one item simultaneously, so they are faced with the challenge of continuously integrating and prioritizing different bottom-up and top-down influences.

SVGC-AVA: 360-Degree Video Saliency Prediction With Spherical Vector-Based Graph Convolution and Audio-Visual Attention

Pascal Frossard, Chenglin Li, Li Wei, Qin Yang, Yuelei Li, Hao Wang

Viewers of 360-degree videos are provided with both visual modality to characterize their surrounding views and audio modality to indicate the sound direction. Though both modalities are important for saliency prediction, little work has been done by joint ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Caroline Karmann, Bahar Aydemir, Kynthia Chamilothori, Seungryong Kim

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023