Abstract Multi-layer light field displays are a type of computational three-dimensional (3D) display which has recently gained increasing interest for its holographic-like effect and natural compatibility with 2D displays. However, the major shortcoming, depth limitation, still cannot be overcome in the traditional light field modeling and reconstruction based on multi-layer liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Considering this disadvantage, our paper incorporates a salience guided depth optimization over a limited display range to calibrate the displayed depth and present the maximum area of salience region for multi-layer light field display. Different from previously reported cascaded light field displays that use the fixed initialization plane as the depth center of display content, our method automatically calibrates the depth initialization based on the salience results derived from the proposed contrast enhanced salience detection method. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method provides a promising advantage in visual perception for the compressive light field displays from both software simulation and prototype demonstration