Attentive Systems: A Survey

Visual saliency analysis detects salient regions/objects that attract human attention in natural scenes. It has attracted intensive research in different fields such as computer vision, computer graphics, and multimedia. While many such computational models exist, the focused study of what and how applications can be beneficial is still lacking. In this article, our ultimate goal is thus to provide a comprehensive review of the applications using saliency cues, the so-called attentive systems. We would like to provide a broad vision about saliency applications and what visual saliency can do. We categorize the vast amount of applications into different areas such as computer vision, computer graphics, and multimedia. Intensively covering 200+ publications we survey (1) key application trends, (2) the role of visual saliency, and (3) the usability of saliency into different tasks.