Making technological advances in the field of human-machine interactions requires that the capabilities and limitations of the human perceptual system are taken into account. The focus of this report is an important mechanism of perception, visual selective attention, which is becoming more and more important for multimedia applications. We introduce the concept of visual attention and describe its underlying mechanisms. In particular, we introduce the concepts of overt and covert visual attention, and of bottom-up and top-down processing. Challenges related to modeling visual attention and their validation using ad hoc ground truth are also discussed. Examples of the usage of visual attention models in image and video processing are presented. We emphasize multimedia delivery, retargeting and quality assessment of image and video, medical imaging, and the field of stereoscopic 3D images applications.
Keywords: Visual system; image analysis; image coding; image communication; image processing; multimedia systems; stereo vision; video signal processing.