Event detection and recognition is still one of the most active fields in computer vision, since the complexity of the dynamic events and the need for computational efficient solutions pose several difficulties. This paper addresses detection and representation of spatiotemporal salient regions using the 3D Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). We propose a framework to measure saliency based on the orientation selective bands of the 3D DWT and represent events using simple features of salient regions. We apply this method to human action recognition, test it on a large public video database consisting of six human actions and compare the results against an established method in the literature. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation indicates the potential of the proposed method to localize and represent human actions.