Hierarchical salient object detection model using contrast-based saliency and color spatial distribution

Visual saliency is an important cue in human visual system to detect salient objects in natural scenes. It has attracted a lot of research focus in computer vision, and has been widely used in many applications including image retrieval, object recognition, image segmentation, and etc. However, the accuracy of salient object detection model remains a challenge. Accordingly, a hierarchical salient object detection model is presented in this paper. In order to accurately interpret object saliency in image, we propose to investigate distinctive features from a global perspective. Image contrast and color distribution are calculated to generate saliency maps respectively, which are then fused using the principal component analysis. Compared with state-of-the-art models, the proposed model can accurately detect the salient object which conform with the human visual principle. The experimental results from the MSRA database validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.     

Salient human detection for robot vision

In this paper, we propose a salient human detection method that uses pre-attentive features and a support vector machine (SVM) for robot vision. From three pre-attentive features (color, luminance and motion), we extracted three feature maps and combined them as a salience map. By using these features, we estimated a given object’s location without pre-assumptions or semi-automatic interaction. We were able to choose the most salient object even if multiple objects existed. We also used the SVM to decide whether a given object was human (among the candidate object regions). For the SVM, we used a new feature extraction method to reduce the feature dimensions and reflect the variations of local features to classifiers by using an edged-mosaic image. The main advantage of the proposed method is that our algorithm was able to detect salient humans regardless of the amount of movement, and also distinguish salient humans from non-salient humans. The proposed algorithm can be easily applied to human robot interfaces for human-like vision systems.

Real-time tracking of multiple objects in space-variant vision based on magnocellular visual pathway

In this paper, we propose a space-variant image representation model based on properties of magnocellular visual pathway, which perform motion analysis, in human retina. Then, we present an algorithm for the tracking of multiple objects in the proposed space-variant model. The proposed space-variant model has two effective image representations for object recognition and motion analysis, respectively. Each image representation is based on properties of two types of ganglion cell, which are the beginning of two basic visual pathways; one is parvocellular and the other is magnocellular. Through this model, we can get the efficient data reduction capability with no great loss of important information. And, the proposed multiple objects tracking method is restricted in space-variant image. Typically, an object-tracking algorithm consists of several processes such as detection, prediction, matching, and updating. In particular, the matching process plays an important role in multiple objects tracking. In traditional vision, the matching process is simple when the target objects are rigid. In space-variant vision, however, it is very complicated although the target is rigid, because there may be deformation of an object region in the space-variant coordinate system when the target moves to another position. Therefore, we propose a deformation formula in order to solve the matching problem in space-variant vision. By solving this problem, we can efficiently implement multiple objects tracking in space-variant vision.     

A comprehensive survey on computer vision based approaches for automatic identification of products in retail store

The ability to recognize a product on the shelf of a retail store is an ordinary human skill. The same recognition problem presents an exceptional challenge for machine vision systems. Automatic detection of products on the shelf of a retail store provides enhanced value-added consumer experience and commercial benefits to retailers. Compared to machine vision based object recognition system, automatic detection of retail products in a store setting has lesser number of successful attempts. In this paper, we present a survey of machine vision based retail product recognition system and define a new taxonomy for this field. We also describe the intrinsic challenges associated with the problem. In this comprehensive survey of published papers, we analyze features used in state-of-the-art attempts. The performances of these approaches are compared. The details of publicly available datasets are presented. The paper concludes pointing to possible directions of research in related fields.     

融合目标增强与稀疏重构的显著性检测

目的 为了解决图像显著性检测中存在的边界模糊,检测准确度不够的问题,提出一种基于目标增强引导和稀疏重构的显著检测算法（OESR）。方法 基于超像素,首先从前景角度计算超像素的中心加权颜色空间分布图,作为前景显著图;由图像边界的超像素构建背景模板并对模板进行预处理,以优化后的背景模板作为稀疏表示的字典,计算稀疏重构误差,并利用误差传播方式进行重构误差的校正,得到背景差异图;最后,利用快速目标检测方法获取一定数量的建议窗口,由窗口的对象性得分计算目标增强系数,以此来引导两种显著图的融合,得到最终显著检测结果。结果 实验在公开数据集上与其他12种流行算法进行比较,所提算法对具有不同背景复杂度的图像能够较准确的检测出显著区域,对显著对象的提取也较为完整,并且在评价指标检测上与其他算法相比,在MSRA10k数据集上平均召回率提高4.1%,在VOC2007数据集上,平均召回率和F检验分别提高18.5%和3.1%。结论 本文提出一种新的显著检测方法,分别利用颜色分布与对比度方法构建显著图,并且在显著图融合时采用一种目标增强系数,提高了显著图的准确性。实验结果表明,本文算法能够检测出更符合视觉特性的显著区域,显著区域更加准确,适用于自然图像的显著性目标检测、目标分割或基于显著性分析的图像标注。     

Specific object retrieval based on salient regions

In this paper, we present an image retrieval technique for specific objects based on salient regions. The salient regions we select are invariant to geometric and photometric variations. Those salient regions are detected based on low level features, and need to be classified into different types before they can be applied on further vision tasks. We first classify the selected regions into four types including blobs, edges and lines, textures, and texture boundaries, by using the correlations with the neigbouring regions. Then, some specific region types are chosen for further object retrieval applications. We observe that regions selected from images of the same object are more similar to each other than regions selected from images of different objects. Correlation is used as the similarity measure between regions selected from different images. Two images are considered to contain the same object, if some regions selected from the first image are highly correlated to some regions selected from the second image. Two data sets are employed for experiment: the first data set contains human face images of a number of different people and is used for testing the retrieval algorithm on distinguishing specific objects of the same category; and the second data set contains images of different objects and is used for testing the retrieval algorithm on distinguishing objects of different categories. The results show that our method is very effective on specific object retrieval.     

动态背景下空时特性均显著的运动目标检测

从序列图像中提取变化区域是运动检测的主要作用,动态背景的干扰严重影响检测结果,使得有效性运动检测成为一项困难工作。受静态图像显著性检测启发,提出了一种新的运动目标检测方法,采用自底向上与自顶向下的视觉计算模型相结合的方式获取图像的空时显著性：先检测出视频序列中的空间显著性,在其基础上加入时间维度,利用改进的三帧差分算法获取具有运动目标的时间显著性,将显著性目标的检测视角由静态图像转换为空时性均显著的运动目标。实验和分析结果表明：新方法在摄像机晃动等动态背景中能较准确检测出空时均显著的运动目标,具有较高的鲁棒性。     

A novel framework for intelligent surveillance system based on abnormal human activity detection in academic environments

Abnormal activity detection plays a crucial role in surveillance applications, and a surveillance system that can perform robustly in an academic environment has become an urgent need. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for an automatic real-time video-based surveillance system which can simultaneously perform the tracking, semantic scene learning, and abnormality detection in an academic environment. To develop our system, we have divided the work into three phases: preprocessing phase, abnormal human activity detection phase, and content-based image retrieval phase. For motion object detection, we used the temporal-differencing algorithm and then located the motions region using the Gaussian function. Furthermore, the shape model based on OMEGA equation was used as a filter for the detected objects (i.e., human and non-human). For object activities analysis, we evaluated and analyzed the human activities of the detected objects. We classified the human activities into two groups: normal activities and abnormal activities based on the support vector machine. The machine then provides an automatic warning in case of abnormal human activities. It also embeds a method to retrieve the detected object from the database for object recognition and identification using content-based image retrieval. Finally, a software-based simulation using MATLAB was performed and the results of the conducted experiments showed an excellent surveillance system that can simultaneously perform the tracking, semantic scene learning, and abnormality detection in an academic environment with no human intervention.

     

Oscillation analysis for salient object detection

Salient object detection from an image is important for many multimedia applications. Existing methods provide good solutions to saliency detection; however, their results often emphasize the high-contrast edges, instead of regions/objects. In this paper, we present a method for salient object detection based on oscillation analysis. Our study shows that salient objects and their backgrounds have different amplitudes of oscillation between the local minima and maxima. Based on this observation, our method analyzes the oscillation in an image by estimating its local minima and maxima and computes the saliency map according to the oscillation magnitude contrast. Our method detects the local minima and maxima and performs extreme interpolation to smoothly propagate these information to the whole image. In this way, the oscillation information is smoothly assigned to regions, retaining well-defined salient boundaries as there are large variations near the salient boundaries (edges between objects and their backgrounds). As a result, our saliency map highlights salient regions/objects instead of high-contrast boundaries. We experiment with our method on two large public data set. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We further apply our salient object detection method to automatic salient object segmentation, which again shows the success.     

Coarse to Fine: Weak Feature Boosting Network for Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection is to identify objects or regions with maximum visual recognition in an image, which brings significant help and improvement to many computer visual processing tasks. Although lots of methods have occurred for salient object detection, the problem is still not perfectly solved especially when the background scene is complex or the salient object is small. In this paper, we propose a novel Weak Feature Boosting Network (WFBNet) for the salient object detection task. In the WFBNet, we extract the unpredictable regions (low confidence regions) of the image via a polynomial function and enhance the features of these regions through a well-designed weak feature boosting module (WFBM). Starting from a coarse saliency map, we gradually refine it according to the boosted features to obtain the final saliency map, and our network does not need any post-processing step. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets using comprehensive evaluation metrics. The results show that our algorithm has considerable advantages over the existing state-of-the-art methods.     

显著性物体检测研究综述

人类的视觉系统能够迅速地、有选择地从视觉场景中检测出感兴趣的目标或者具有显著特征的物体,并根据更高层次的视觉任务目的对它们进行处理和理解,从而实现相应的行为或决策.将人类这种选择性视觉注意机制引入到计算机视觉的信息处理中,可以有效地减少视觉计算所需处理的数据量、加速整个处理过程,并进一步方便更高层次视觉任务的处理,因而...     

基于频域与空间域分析的显著区域检测算法

显著区域检测对于多种计算机视觉应用有所帮助,如图像分割、目标识别、图像检索及自适应压缩。为此,提出一个基于频域与空间域分析的显著区域检测算法。通过拥有不同尺寸窗口的中值滤波器对不显著的区域进行抑制,根据空间信息选择最佳的显著图。与 5个经典算法的比较实验结果表明,利用该算法得到的显著图既去除了背景,又突出了整个显著物体。     

Salient object detection using color spatial distribution and minimum spanning tree weight

Salient object detection is very useful in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation, content-based image editing and object recognition. In this paper, we present a salient object detection algorithm by using color spatial distribution (CSD) and minimum spanning tree weight (MSTW). We first use a segmentation algorithm to decompose an image into superpixel-level elements, then use these elements as nodes to construct a minimum spanning tree (MST), each connected edge weight is the mean color difference between two nodes. CSD of each element can be computed by integrating color, spatial distance and MSTW. Note that if the color of one element is the most widely distributed over the entire image, it should have the biggest CSD value, we regard this element as a background node (BG Node). Then we use the MSTW between other element and BG node to generate a MSTW map. The superpixel-level saliency map can be obtained by combining the CSD map and MSTW map. Finally, we use a guided filter to get the pixel-level saliency map. Experimental results on two databases demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other previous state-of-the-art approaches.     

视觉注意机制在大视场目标快速定位中的应用

视觉心理学研究表明人类在看一个场景时,往往会在很短时间内找到几个显著区,然后再细看显著区域的内容,这样可以使得人类可以快速分析复杂图像。算法首先模拟人类视觉系统特点,根据图像的底层信息如对比度、方向、亮度等提取图像中几个最需要关注的显著区域,然后按照显著性由强到弱的顺序分别在每个显著区域利用具有尺度旋转不变性的对数极坐标变换方法进行目标的匹配定位。该方法在没有牺牲定位准确度的前提下,大幅减小了运算复杂度。实验表明该算法定位速度快而且准确。     

A novel unsupervised 3D skeleton detection in RGB-D images for video surveillance

In this paper we present a novel moment-based skeleton detection for representing human objects in RGB-D videos with animated 3D skeletons. An object often consists of several parts, where each of them can be concisely represented with a skeleton. However, it remains as a challenge to detect the skeletons of individual objects in an image since it requires an effective part detector and a part merging algorithm to group parts into objects. In this paper, we present a novel fully unsupervised learning framework to detect the skeletons of human objects in a RGB-D video. The skeleton modeling algorithm uses a pipeline architecture which consists of a series of cascaded operations, i.e., symmetry patch detection, linear time search of symmetry patch pairs, part and symmetry detection, symmetry graph partitioning, and object segmentation. The properties of geometric moment-based functions for embedding symmetry features into centers of symmetry patches are also investigated in detail. As compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for skeleton detection, the proposed approach does not require tedious human labeling work on training images to locate the skeleton pixels and their associated scale information. Although our algorithm can detect parts and objects simultaneously, a pre-learned convolution neural network (CNN) can be used to locate the human object from each frame of the input video RGB-D video in order to achieve the goal of constructing real-time applications. This much reduces the complexity to detect the skeleton structure of individual human objects with our proposed method. Using the segmented human object skeleton model, a video surveillance application is constructed to verify the effectiveness of the approach. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives good performance in terms of detection and recognition using publicly available datasets.

     

一种新的动态轮廓模型

动态轮廓模型是提取图象中物体轮廓的一种有效方法，提取图象中物体的轮廓在计算机视觉和模式识别中有很重要的意义。Ｋａｓｓ提出的能量最小化动态轮廓模型，称为Ｓｎａｋｅ，被证明是提取图象中凸形物体轮廓的有效方法。文中对Ｋａｓｓ的模型进行详细分析，指出它的局限性和不足之处，对它进行改进，提出一种新的动态轮廓模型，该模型不但能精确地提取图象中的凸形物体的轮廓，而且能提取一些凹形物体和多个物体的轮廓，在任何情况     

基于图像显著性检测的图像分割

图像分割在许多图像处理和机器视觉问题中是一个非常重要的过程,是将一幅图分割成几个显著的区域,然而不能将其中最显著的目标直接分割出来,需要进一步处理。为此本文采用显著性检测的算法实现了对目标的分割。显著性区域检测可以应用于目标检测、图像检索、图像分割等机器视觉问题。使用杨等人提出的基于图论的流形排序算法检测显著性算法得到显著性图,再结合mean-shift分割算法,实现了对视觉显著性目标分割提取,可获得可观的图像分割结果,并将此算法应用到了森林火灾检测中,能对图像中的火焰部分进行有效的分割提取。     

Moving shadow detection and removal for traffic sequences

Segmentation of moving objects in a video sequence is a basic task for application of computer vision. However, shadows extracted along with the objects can result in large errors in object localization and recognition. In this paper, we propose a method of moving shadow detection based on edge information, which can effectively detect the cast shadow of a moving vehicle in a traffic scene. Having confirmed shadows existing in a figure, we execute the shadow removal algorithm proposed in this paper to segment the shadow from the foreground. The shadow eliminating algorithm removes the boundary of the cast shadow and preserves object edges firstly; secondly, it reconstructs coarse object shapes based on the edge information of objects; and finally, it extracts the cast shadow by subtracting the moving object from the change detection mask and performs further processing. The proposed method has been further tested on images taken under different shadow orientations, vehicle colors and vehicle sizes, and the results have revealed that shadows can be successfully eliminated and thus good video segmentation can be obtained.     

Salient object detection via region contrast and graph regularization基于区域对比度和图正则化的显著目标检测

Detection of salient objects in an image is now gaining increasing research interest in computer vision community. In this study, a novel region-contrast based saliency detection solution involving three phases is proposed. First, a color-based super-pixels segmentation approach is used to decompose the image into regions. Second, three high-level saliency measures which could effectively characterize the salient regions are evaluated and integrated in an effective manner to produce the initial saliency map. Finally, we construct a pairwise graphical model to encourage that adjacent image regions with similar features take continuous saliency values, thus producing the more perceptually consistent saliency map. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on three public benchmark datasets, and show it can produce promising results when compared to 14 state-of-the-art salient object detection approaches.     

Region saliency detection via multi-feature on absorbing Markov chain

Saliency region detection plays an important role in image pre-processing, and uniformly emphasizing saliency region is still an intractable problem in computer vision. In this paper, we present a data-driven salient region detection method via multi-feature (included contrast, spatial relationship and background prior, etc.) on absorbing Markov chain, which uses super pixel to extract salient regions, and each super-pixel represents a node. In detail, we first construct function to calculate absorption probability of each node on absorbing Markov chain. Second we utilize image contrast and space relation to model the prior salient map which is provided to foreground salient nodes and then calculate the saliency of nodes based on absorption probability. Third, we also exploit background prior to supply the absorbing nodes and compute the saliency of nodes. Finally, we fuse both the saliency of nodes by cosine similarity measurement method and acquire the ultimate saliency map. Our approach is simple and efficient and highlights not only a single object but also multiple objects consistently. We test the proposed method on MSRA-B, iCoSeg and SED databases. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach presents better robustness and efficiency against the eleven state-of-the art algorithms.