The invention belongs to the field of computer vision and relates to a space salient region extraction method based on a depth variation model. The method comprises the steps of firstly, correcting a camera, selecting a keyframe image sequence in an image, acquiring an original depth image with the discrete space sampling method, and constructing the energy function of a depth estimation model under the variation mode; then, solving the energy function with the primal-dual algorithm to achieve optimization of the depth model; conducting rough salient region extraction on the optimized depth image with the salient filter algorithm, and optimizing a salient region by means of an improved pulse coupling neural network to achieve accurate extraction of the depth salient region; finally, reconstructing a three-dimensional salient area. According to the method, based on the relevance between different coordinate systems under a specific visual angle and the perspective projection transformation relation of the camera, the energy function contains multi-view image restraint, the computation complexity of solving of an algorithm model is reduced, and depth image estimation quality is improved.