High-level background prior based salient object detection

Salient object detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Existing methods using only low-level features failed to uniformly highlight the salient object regions. In order to combine high-level saliency priors and low-level appearance cues, we propose a novel Background Prior based Salient detection method (BPS) for high-quality salient object detection.Different from other background prior based methods, a background estimation is added before performing saliency detection. We utilize the distribution of bounding boxes generated by a generic object proposal method to obtain background information. Three background priors are mainly considered to model the saliency, namely background connectivity prior, background contrast prior and spatial distribution prior, allowing the proposed method to highlight the salient object as a whole and suppress background clutters.Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets validate that our method outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, while being more efficient than most leading methods.     

Bayesian salient object detection based on saliency driven clustering

Salient object detection is essential for applications, such as image classification, object recognition and image retrieval. In this paper, we design a new approach to detect salient objects from an image by describing what does salient objects and backgrounds look like using statistic of the image. First, we introduce a saliency driven clustering method to reveal distinct visual patterns of images by generating image clusters. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is applied to represent the statistic of each cluster, which is used to compute the color spatial distribution. Second, three kinds of regional saliency measures, i.e, regional color contrast saliency, regional boundary prior saliency and regional color spatial distribution, are computed and combined. Then, a region selection strategy integrating color contrast prior, boundary prior and visual patterns information of images is presented. The pixels of an image are divided into either potential salient region or background region adaptively based on the combined regional saliency measures. Finally, a Bayesian framework is employed to compute the saliency value for each pixel taking the regional saliency values as priority. Our approach has been extensively evaluated on two popular image databases. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve considerable performance improvement in terms of commonly adopted performance measures in salient object detection.     

An integration of bottom-up and top-down salient cues on RGB-D data: saliency from objectness versus non-objectness

Bottom-up and top-down visual cues are two types of information that helps the visual saliency models. These salient cues can be from spatial distributions of the features (space-based saliency) or contextual/task-dependent features (object-based saliency). Saliency models generally incorporate salient cues either in bottom-up or top-down norm separately. In this work, we combine bottom-up and top-down cues from both space- and object-based salient features on RGB-D data. In addition, we also investigated the ability of various pre-trained convolutional neural networks for extracting top-down saliency on color images based on the object dependent feature activation. We demonstrate that combining salient features from color and dept through bottom-up and top-down methods gives significant improvement on the salient object detection with space-based and object-based salient cues. RGB-D saliency integration framework yields promising results compared with the several state-of-the-art-models.     

Superpixel based color contrast and color distribution driven salient object detection

Color is the most informative low-level feature and might convey tremendous saliency information of a given image. Unfortunately, color feature is seldom fully exploited in the previous saliency models. Motivated by the three basic disciplines of a salient object which are respectively center distribution prior, high color contrast to surroundings and compact color distribution, in this paper, we design a comprehensive salient object detection system which takes the advantages of color contrast together with color distribution and outputs high quality saliency maps. The overall procedure flow of our unified framework contains superpixel pre-segmentation, color contrast and color distribution computation, combination, and final refinement.In color contrast saliency computation, we calculate center-surrounded color contrast and then employ the distribution prior in order to select correct color components. A global saliency smoothing procedure that is based on superpixel regions is introduced as well. This processing step preferably alleviates the saliency distortion problem, leading to the entire object being highlighted uniformly. Finally, a saliency refinement approach is adopted to eliminate artifacts and recover unconnected parts within the combined saliency maps.In visual comparison, our method produces higher quality saliency maps which stress out the total object meanwhile suppress background clutter. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments show our approach outperforms 8 state-of-the-art methods, achieving the highest precision rate 96% (3% improvement from the current highest), when evaluated via one of the most popular data sets. Excellent content-aware image resizing also could be achieved using our saliency maps.     

Image saliency estimation via random walk guided by informativeness and latent signal correlations

Visual saliency is an effective tool for perceptual image processing. In the past decades, many saliency models have been proposed by primarily considering visual cues such as local contrast and global rarity. However, such explicit cues derived only from input stimuli are often insufficient to separate targets from distractors, leading to noisy saliency maps. In fact, the latent cues, especially the latent signal correlations that link visually distinct stimuli (e.g., various parts of a salient target), may also play an important role in saliency estimation. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach for image saliency estimation by incorporating both explicit visual cues and latent signal correlations. In our approach, the latent correlations between various image patches are first derived according to the statistical prior obtained from 10 million reference images. After that, the informativeness of image patches and their latent correlations are jointly considered to construct a directed graph, on which a random walking process is performed to generate saliency maps that pop-out only the most salient locations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves impressive performances on three public image benchmarks.     

Compressed domain video saliency detection using global and local spatiotemporal features

A compressed domain video saliency detection algorithm, which employs global and local spatiotemporal (GLST) features, is proposed in this work. We first conduct partial decoding of a compressed video bitstream to obtain motion vectors and DCT coefficients, from which GLST features are extracted. More specifically, we extract the spatial features of rarity, compactness, and center prior from DC coefficients by investigating the global color distribution in a frame. We also extract the spatial feature of texture contrast from AC coefficients to identify regions, whose local textures are distinct from those of neighboring regions. Moreover, we use the temporal features of motion intensity and motion contrast to detect visually important motions. Then, we generate spatial and temporal saliency maps, respectively, by linearly combining the spatial features and the temporal features. Finally, we fuse the two saliency maps into a spatiotemporal saliency map adaptively by comparing the robustness of the spatial features with that of the temporal features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides excellent saliency detection performance, while requiring low complexity and thus performing the detection in real-time.     

IR saliency detection via a GCF-SB visual attention framework

Infrared (IR) saliency detection with high detection accuracy is a challenging task due to the complex background and low contrast of IR images. In this paper, an IR saliency detection method via a new visual attention framework is proposed, which comprises two phases. In the first phase, a Gray & Contrast Features (GCF) model is established, in which the IR image is processed in two feature channels, a gray feature channel and a contrast feature channel. And then a primary feature map can be obtained by fusing the gray and contrast features from these two channels, which is the basis of the second phase. In the second phase, a Similarity-based Bayes (SB) model is established, in which two prior probabilities and two likelihood functions are calculated according to the previously obtained primary feature map. Finally, the saliency map is calculated with the obtained prior probabilities and likelihood functions by Bayes formula. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively reduce noise and enhance contrast of IR images with complex background and low contrast, and obtain a higher detection accuracy and robustness than seven state-of-the-art methods.     

融合高低层多特征的显著性检测算法

针对单一显著性特征无法全面表达图像显著性致使显著性检测精度不高等问题，本文提出了一种多特征融合的显著性检测算法。算法在高层先验知识基础上，对靠近中心的超像素设置高显著值，利用高斯分布求解中心先验；在底层特征上融合图像的边界稀疏、全局对比度、颜色空间分布和超级像素差异等4种显著特征，利用类间差异最大阈值对高低层特征进行线性和非线性融合，最终得到高质量的显著图。在MSRA-1000、SED、SOD 3个公开的数据集上进行实验，结果表明：本文算法融合得到的显著图边缘清晰、显著区域突出均匀，在有效抑制背景信息的同时所得显著图像视觉感知更好，与其他显著性算法相比查全率和查准率上至少提高3.4%。     

Salient object detection via a boundary-guided graph structure

Graph-based salient object detection methods have gained more and more attention recently. However, existing works fail to separate effectively salient object and background in some challenging scenes. Inspired by this observation, we propose an effective salient object detection method based on a novel boundary-guided graph structure. More specifically, the input image is firstly segmented into a series of superpixels. Then we integrate two prior cues to generate the coarse saliency map, a novel weighting mechanism is proposed to balance the proportion of two prior cues according to their performance. Secondly, we propose a novel boundary-guided graph structure to explore deeply the intrinsic relevance between superpixels. Based on the proposed graph structure, an iterative propagation mechanism is constructed to refine the coarse saliency map. Experimental results on four datasets show adequately the superiority of the proposed method than other state-of-the-art methods.     

Saliency detection based on singular value decomposition

Saliency detection has gained popularity in many applications, and many different approaches have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on singular value decomposition (SVD) for saliency detection. Our algorithm considers both the human-perception mechanism and the relationship between the singular values of an image decomposed by SVD and its salient regions. The key concept of our proposed algorithms is based on the fact that salient regions are the important parts of an image. The singular values of an image are divided into three groups: large, intermediate, and small singular values. We propose the hypotheses that the large singular values mainly contain information about the non-salient background and slight information about the salient regions, while the intermediate singular values contain most or even all of the saliency information. The small singular values contain little or even none of the saliency information. These hypotheses are validated by experiments. By regularization based on the average information, regularization using the leading largest singular values or regularization based on machine learning, the salient regions will become more conspicuous. In our proposed approach, learning-based methods are proposed to improve the accuracy of detecting salient regions in images. Gaussian filters are also employed to enhance the saliency information. Experimental results prove that our methods based on SVD achieve superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods for human-eye fixations, as well as salient-object detection, in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) score, the linear correlation coefficient (CC) score, the normalized scan-path saliency (NSS) score, the F-measure score, and visual quality.     

Two-stage salient region detection by exploiting multiple priors

Saliency detection has become a valuable tool for many image processing tasks, like image retargeting, object recognition, and adaptive compression. With the rapid development of the saliency detection methods, people have approved the hypothesis that “the appearance contrast between the salient object and the background is high”, and build their saliency methods on some priors that explain this hypothesis. However, these methods are not satisfactory enough. We propose a two-stage salient region detection method. The input image is first segmented into superpixels. In the first stage, two measures which measure the isolation and distribution of each superpixel are proposed, we consider that both of these two measures are important for finding the salient regions, thus the image-feature-based saliency map is obtained by combining the two measures. Then, in the second stage, we incorporate into the image-feature-based saliency map a location prior map to emphasize the foci of attention. In this algorithm, six priors that explain what is the salient region are exploited. The proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods using one of the largest publicly available standard databases, the experimental result indicates that the proposed method has better performance. We also demonstrate how the saliency map of the proposed method can be used to create high quality of initial segmentation masks for subsequent image processing, like Grabcut based salient object segmentation.     

基于稀疏和低秩表示的显著性目标检测

文中研究了无监督自下而上的显著性目标检测方法。基于显著性目标在自然图像中稀疏分布的这一先验性假设,提出了一种用低秩和稀疏表示进行显著性目标检测的方法。根据图像背景的先验分布,首先选取一个有效的背景字典来低秩表示图像的背景部分,进而更好地分离出显著性前景。由于人类视觉中心偏好可知,图像的边缘部分不易引起关注,故选取这些边缘部分作为背景先验来选取背景字典。与其他基于稀疏和低秩分解的显著性目标检测相比,文中选取的背景字典更简单有效,且能得到更好的显著性图。实验结果显示,该方法比主流的显著性检测方法得到的显著性图更令人满意。     

基于全卷积网络的语义显著性区域检测方法研究

基于底层视觉特征和先验知识的显著性区域检测算法难以检测一些复杂的显著性目标,人的视觉系统能分辨这些目标是由于其中包含丰富的语义知识.本文构建了一个基于全卷积结构的语义显著性区域检测网络,用数据驱动的方式构建从图像底层特征到人类语义认知的映射,提取语义显著性区域.针对网络提取的语义显著性区域的缺点,本文进一步引入颜色信息、目标边界信息、空间一致性信息获得准确的超像素级前景和背景概率.最后提出一个优化模型融合前景和背景概率信息、语义信息、空间一致性信息得到最终的显著性区域图.在6个数据集上与15种最新算法的比较实验证明了本文算法的有效性和鲁棒性.     

Saliency detection using joint spatial-color constraint and multi-scale segmentation

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to detect salient regions in images. To measure pixel-level saliency, joint spatial-color constraint is defined, i.e., spatial constraint (SC), color double-opponent (CD) constraint and similarity distribution (SD) constraint. The SC constraint is designed to produce global contrast with ability to distinguish the difference between “center and surround”. The CD constraint is introduced to extract intensive contrast of red-green and blue-yellow double opponency. The SD constraint is developed to detect the salient object and its background. A two-layer structure is adopted to merge the SC, CD and SD saliency into a saliency map. In order to obtain a consistent saliency map, the region-based saliency detection is performed by incorporating a multi-scale segmentation technique. The proposed method is evaluated on two image datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on salient region detection as well as human fixation prediction.     

视觉注意驱动的基于混沌分析的运动检测方法

提出了视觉注意驱动的基于混沌分析的运动检测方法(MDSA)。MDSA首先基于视觉注意机制提取图像的显著区域,而后对显著区域进行混沌分析以检测运动目标。算法技术路线为:首先根据场景图像提取多种视觉敏感的底层图像特征;然后根据特征综合理论将这些特征融合起来得到一幅反映场景图像中各个位置视觉显著性的显著图;而后对显著性水平最高的图像位置所在的显著区域运用混沌分析的方法进行运动检测;根据邻近优先和返回抑制原则提取下一最显著区域并进行运动检测,直至遍历所有的显著区域。本文对传统的显著区域提取方法进行了改进以减少计算量:以邻域标准差代替center-surround算子评估图像各位置的局部显著度,采用显著点聚类的方法代替尺度显著性准则提取显著区域;混沌分析首先判断各显著区域的联合直方图（JH）是否呈现混沌特征,而后依据分维数以一固定阈值对存在混沌的JH中各散点进行分类,最后将分类结果对应到显著区域从而实现运动分割。MDSA具有较好的运动分割效果和抗噪性能,对比实验和算法开销分析证明MDSA优于基于马塞克的运动检测方法（MDM）。      

A heuristic framework for perceptual saliency prediction

Saliency prediction can be regarded as the human spontaneous activity. The most effective saliency model should highly approximate the response of viewers to the perceived information. In the paper, we exploit the perception response for saliency detection and propose a heuristic framework to predict salient region. First, to find the perceptually meaningful salient regions, an orientation selectivity based local feature and a visual Acuity based global feature are proposed to jointly predict candidate salient regions. Subsequently, to further boost the accuracy of saliency map, we introduce a visual error sensitivity based operator to activate the meaningful salient regions from a local and global perspective. In addition, an adaptive fusion method based on free energy principle is designed to combine the sub-saliency maps from each image channel to obtain the final saliency map. Experimental results on five natural and emotional datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to twelve state-of-the-art algorithms.     

Saliency detection for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes

Saliency detection has been researched for conventional images with standard aspect ratios, however, it is a challenging problem for panoramic images with wide fields of view. In this paper, we propose a saliency detection algorithm for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes. We observe that a typical panoramic image includes several homogeneous background regions yielding horizontally elongated distributions, as well as multiple foreground objects with arbitrary locations. We first estimate the background of panoramic images by selecting homogeneous superpixels using geodesic similarity and analyzing their spatial distributions. Then we iteratively refine an initial saliency map derived from background estimation by computing the feature contrast only within local surrounding area whose range and shape are changed adaptively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm detects multiple salient objects faithfully while suppressing the background successfully, and it yields a significantly better performance of panorama saliency detection compared with the recent state-of-the-art techniques.     

Global salient information maximization for saliency detection

In this paper, a new method for saliency detection is proposed. Based on the defined features of the salient object, we solve the problem of saliency detection from three aspects. Firstly, from the view of global information, we partition the image into two clusters, namely, salient component and background component by employing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering. Secondly, the maximal salient information is applied to find the position of saliency and eliminate the noise. Thirdly, we enhance the saliency for the salient regions while weaken the background regions. Finally, the saliency map is obtained based on these aspects. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better results than the state of the art methods. And this method can be applied for graph based salient object segmentation.     

Salient region detection through sparse reconstruction and graph-based ranking

In this paper, we propose a salient region detection algorithm from the point of view of unique and compact representation of individual image. In first step, the original image is segmented into super-pixels. In second step, the sparse representation measure and uniqueness of the features are computed. Then both are ranked on the basis of the background and foreground seeds respectively. Thirdly, a location prior map is used to enhance the foci of attention. We apply the Bayes procedure to integrate computed results to produce smooth and precise saliency map. We compare our proposed algorithm against the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods using four of the largest widely available standard data-bases, experimental results specify that the proposed algorithm outperforms. We also show that how the saliency map of the proposed method is used to discover outline of object, furthermore using this outline our method produce the saliency cut of the desired object.