Techniques for determining motion saliency in video content using center-surround receptive fields. In some implementations, images or frames from a video may be apportioned into non-overlapped regions, for example, by applying a rectilinear grid. For each grid region, or cell, motion consistency may be measured between the center and surround area of that cell across frames of the video. Consistent motion across the center-surround area may indicate that the corresponding region has low variation. The larger the difference between center-surround motions in a cell, the more likely the region has high motion saliency.