1. An improved visual attention model of the type that segments a frame of a video sequence into regions for processing by a plurality of spatial features to produce a corresponding plurality of spatial importance maps, that compares the frame with a previous frame for processing to produce a temporal importance map, and that combines the spatial and temporal importance maps to produce a total importance map for the frame, wherein the improvement comprises the steps of: adaptively segmenting the frame into the regions using color along with luminance; processing the regions with a plurality of spatial features to produce the plurality of spatial importance maps; processing the frame with the previous frame to produce the temporal importance map that is compensated for camera motion; and combining the spatial and temporal importance maps based upon a weighting function derived from eye movement studies to produce the total importance map for the frame.