De-emphasis of distracting image regions using texture power maps

A major obstacle in photography is the presence of distracting elements that pull attention away from the main subject and clutter the composition. Photographers have developed post-processing techniques to reduce the salience of distractors by altering low-level features to which the visual system is particularly attuned: sharpness, brightness, chromaticity, or saturation. Biologically-inspired models of attention identify salient regions as statistical outliers in these feature distributions. One low-level feature that cannot be directly manipulated with existing image-editing software is texture variation. Psychophysical studies have shown that discontinuities in texture can elicit an edge perception similar to that triggered by color discontinuities.