FAQ
Common questions about Salience — what it does, how accurate the predictions are, and what happens to your images.
1. What does Salience do?
Salience analyses a photograph and predicts where attention is likely to gather as a heatmap, and how the eye is likely to move through the frame as a scanpath.
2. Is Salience free to use?
Yes. Salience is free to use, browser-based, and requires no signup or account.
3. Are my uploaded photos stored?
No. Uploaded images are processed only to generate your heatmap and scanpath, then removed from server memory after a short period. See the Privacy page for more detail.
4. How accurate are the predictions?
The results are indicative, not measurements of real viewer behaviour. They suggest likely attention patterns based on vision-science research, but every viewer is different. Think of them as a compositional guide, not a verdict.
5. What models power the analysis?
Heatmaps are generated with UNISAL, a vision-science model trained on human attention data.
Scanpaths combine a custom algorithm built by the Salience team with DeepGaze III, an autoregressive eye-fixation model. Together they predict the likely eye-movement sequence through the frame.
See the Research Credits section for the underlying papers and model references.
6. Can I use the results commercially?
Yes. You retain ownership of the images you upload, and of the heatmap and scanpath outputs generated from them. See the Terms page for more details.
7. Why does the heatmap sometimes seem to ignore my main subject?
The heatmap predicts where visual attention is most likely to be drawn, often by contrast, edges, brightness, isolation, or other salient features in the frame. That does not always match the subject you intended. When it does not, the result can still be useful: it may reveal a distraction, a competing point of interest, or a gap between intention and attention.