A method for generating a system for predicting saliency in an image and method of use of the prediction system are described. Attention maps for each of a set of training images are used to train the system. The training includes passing the training images though a neural network and optimizing an objective function over the training set which is based on a distance measure computed between a first probability distribution computed for a saliency map output by the neural network and a second probability distribution computed for the attention map for the respective training image. The trained neural network is suited to generation of saliency maps for new images.