LAUSR

Video saliency detection (VSD) aims at fast locating the most attractive objects/things/patterns in a given video clip. Existing VSD-related works have mainly relied on the visual system but paid less attention to the audio aspect. In contrast, our audio system is the most vital complementary part of our visual system. Also, audio-visual saliency detection (AVSD), one of the most representative research topics for mimicking human perceptual mechanisms, is currently in its infancy, and none of the existing survey papers have touched on it, especially from the perspective of saliency detection. Thus, the ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an extensive review to bridge the gap between audio-visual fusion and saliency detection. In addition, as another highlight of this review, we have provided a deep insight into key factors that could directly determine AVSD deep models’ performances. We claim that the audio-visual consistency degree (AVC) — a long-overlooked issue, can directly influence the effectiveness of using audio to benefit its visual counterpart when performing saliency detection. Moreover, to make the AVC issue more practical and valuable for future followers, we have newly equipped almost all existing publicly available AVSD datasets with additional frame-wise AVC labels. Based on these upgraded datasets, we have conducted extensive quantitative evaluations to ground our claim on the importance of AVC in the AVSD task. In a word, our ideas and new sets serve as a convenient platform with preliminaries and guidelines, all of which can potentially facilitate future works in further promoting state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.