中文摘要：

信息技术的发展使各种图像信息日益膨胀，如何从中找到重要的信息一直是机器视觉和信息处理研究中长期面临的重要问题。将视觉注意力机制引入到图像分析领域，则能获得高效的检索能力。本文首先介绍了视觉注意力、视觉注意力计算模型及研究现状，其次分析了图像中引入视觉显著性的必要性和重要性，论述了图像视觉显著性的层次、显著性特征的选择及度量；最后给出了有待研究的重点问题。

英文摘要：

Image information is increasing very fast with the development of information technology. How to find important information is always a critical problem in computer vision and information process study. High retrieval efficiency will be achieved if visual attention mechanism is adopted. Firstly, visual attention mechanism, visual attention computing model and the art state are introduced. Secondly, the need and importance of visual saliency in image are analyzed. In addition, the levels, extraction and measurement of visual saliency are discussed in detail. At last, open problems are put forward.