Saliency detection aims to locate the most attractive areas in image or video data, as the basic task of computer vision field, has receive intensive attentions. Many methods have been proposed recently, these methods usually can be classified into two branches: visual saliency detection and salient object detection. Tough the methods of two branches usually share the similar features and even the frameworks, their performances on datasets of different branch have large gap, seldom works have compared and analyzed them. In this work, we will provide a detailed review and analysis of main works in two branches, including their mechanism, metrics and datasets. Besides, in this work, we summarized approaches to boost visual saliency detection methods for the task of salient object detection. With these approaches, visual saliency detection methods can be applied to detect the salient object and show superior performance that even outperform some specialized state-of-the-art salient object detection methods, thus reduce the performance inconsistence in different specialized datasets.
