1. A method of visual saliency estimation, the method comprising: receiving an input sequence of image frames, wherein each image frame has one or more channels of pixels; for each channel of each image frame: generating corresponding neural spiking data including neural spikes, wherein said corresponding neural spiking data represents a pixel intensity of each pixel of said channel; generating a corresponding multi-scale data structure based on said corresponding neural spiking data, wherein said corresponding multi-scale data structure comprises one or more data layers, and wherein each data layer outputs a neural spiking representation based on spatial subsampling of said corresponding neural spiking data at a given subsampling scale; and for each data layer of said corresponding multi-scale data structure, extracting a corresponding map of features by processing a neural spiking representation outputted by said data layer; and for each map of features extracted, encoding features of said map of features as neural spikes.