  The bottom-up saliency, an early stage of humans' visual attention, can be
considered as a binary classification problem between centre and surround
classes. Discriminant power of features for the classification is measured as
mutual information between distributions of image features and corresponding
classes . As the estimated discrepancy very much depends on considered scale
level, multi-scale structure and discriminant power are integrated by employing
discrete wavelet features and Hidden Markov Tree (HMT). With wavelet
coefficients and Hidden Markov Tree parameters, quad-tree like label structures
are constructed and utilized in maximum a posterior probability (MAP) of hidden
class variables at corresponding dyadic sub-squares. Then, a saliency value for
each square block at each scale level is computed with discriminant power
principle. Finally, across multiple scales is integrated the final saliency map
by an information maximization rule. Both standard quantitative tools such as
NSS, LCC, AUC and qualitative assessments are used for evaluating the proposed
multi-scale discriminant saliency (MDIS) method against the well-know
information based approach AIM on its released image collection with
eye-tracking data. Simulation results are presented and analysed to verify the
validity of MDIS as well as point out its limitation for further research
direction.
