About salience

A term we've used quite a bit in our articles is Salience. But what is Salience?

Google dictionary describes salience as the quality of being particularly noticeable or important; prominence.

In short, areas with high salience receive relatively more visual attention than other areas. Salience is relevant for the assessment of the effectiveness of marketing materials. Ads with high salience are more likely to break through the clutter. 

Essential elements, such as branding in an advertisement, must also be salient to ensure that people actually see them. What doesn’t get noticed, won’t be remembered, and ultimately won’t be bought.

The way we use salience for our heatmaps
Our neural net predicts the salience value for every individual pixel in your image (and for every pixel in every frame for your video). The value for every pixel will be between 0.00 and 1.00. These values are then mapped with the settings, as set using the heatmap settings or pre-set.

It's important to note that, even if you're choosing different visualizations for your image or video (like our Reveal pre-set for example), the found salience values will always be the same. As an example, we will use the case of the normal pre-set, which uses the Jet color scheme, as depicted below.

The scale for this pre-set goes from dark blue (areas that aren't salient, salience = 0.01) to dark red (areas that are highly salient, salience = 1.00). For visualization purposes areas that aren't salient at all (the salience value is 0) the heatmap becomes transparent.