Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a non-contact technique which consists in acquiring a set of multi-light images by varying the direction of the illumination source on a scene or a surface. This technique provides access to a wide variety of local surface attributes which describe the angular reflectance of surfaces as well as their local microgeometry (stereo photometric approach). In the context of the inspection of the visual quality of surfaces, an essential issue is to be able to estimate the local visual saliency of the inspected surfaces from the often-voluminous acquired RTI data in order to quantitatively evaluate the local appearance properties of a surface. In this work, a multi-scale and multi-level methodology is proposed and the approach is extended to allow for the global comparison of different surface roughnesses in terms of their visual properties. The methodology is applied on different industrial surfaces, and the results show that the visual saliency maps thus obtained allow an objective quantitative evaluation of the local and global visual properties on the inspected surfaces.