Saliency Detection via Multi-Scale Global Cues

Saliency detection has been a hot topic in computer vision and image processing communities. Utilizing the global cues has been shown effective in saliency detection, whereas most of prior works mainly considered the single-scale segmentation when the global cues are employed. In this paper, we attempt to incorporate the multi-scale global cues (MSGC) for saliency detection. Achieving this proposal is interesting and also challenging (e.g., how to obtain appropriate foreground and background seeds; how to merge rough saliency results into the final saliency map efficiently). To alleviate various challenges, we present a solution that integrates three targeted techniques: (i) a self-adaptive approach for obtaining appropriate filter parameters; (ii) a cross-validation approach for selecting appropriate background and foreground seeds; and (iii) a weight-based approach for merging the rough saliency maps. Our solution is easy-to-understand and implement, but without loss of effectiveness. We have validated its competitiveness through widely used benchmark datasets.

Stereoscopic perception is an important part of human visual system that allows the brain to perceive depth. However, depth information has not been well explored in existing saliency detection models. In this letter, a novel saliency detection method for stereoscopic images is proposed. Firstly, we propose a measure to evaluate the reliability of depth map, and use it to reduce the influence of poor depth map on saliency detection. Then, the input image is represented as a graph, and the depth information is introduced into graph construction. After that, a new definition of compactness using color and depth cues is put forward to compute the compactness saliency map. In order to compensate the detection errors of compactness saliency when the salient regions have similar appearances with background, foreground saliency map is calculated based on depth-refined foreground seeds selection mechanism and multiple cues contrast. Finally, these two saliency maps are integrated into a final saliency map through weighted-sum method according to their importance. Experiments on two publicly available stereo datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than other 10 state-of-the-art approaches.

Saliency detection is a technique for automatically extracting regions of interest from the background and has been widely used in the computer vision field. This study proposes a simple and effective saliency detection method combining color contrast and hash fingerprint. In our solution, the input image is segmented into nonoverlapping superpixels, so as to perform the saliency detection at the region level to reduce computational complexity. A background optimization selection is used to construct an accurate background template. Based on this, a saliency map that highlights the whole salient region is obtained by estimating color contrast. Besides, another saliency map that enhances the salient region while restraining the background is also generated through hash fingerprint matching. Ultimately, the final saliency map can be obtained by fusing the two saliency maps. Comparing the performance with other methods, the proposed algorithm works better even in the presence of complex background or very large salient regions.

Saliency detection is a fundamental problem in computational and cognitive sciences. Nowadays, graph-based methods are widely applied to saliency detection including manifold ranking(MR) method, which is shown to be fast and effective. However, because of only using a single feature and imperfect selection strategy for background seeds, MR has a poor performance in some circumstances. In order to complete more challenging saliency detection, an improved method based on manifold ranking algorithm is proposed in this paper. The adopted parallel architecture enables the final detection results generated with the combination of calculations from background seeds and foreground seeds. These seeds are quickly obtained by using priori information and the graph structure is optimized with adding three constraints. Moreover, the graph edge weights are computed by utilizing a adaptive local width parameter and measuring multi-features distance. Three-stage strategy is used to calculate the final saliency map. Experiment results on two large famous datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better comparing with MR and other state-of-the-art methods.

Video saliency detection aims to pop out the most salient regions in every frame of a video. Up to now, many efforts have been made from various aspects for video saliency detection. Unfortunately, the existing video saliency models are very likely to fail in challenging videos with complicated motions and complex scenes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve the saliency detection results generated by existing video saliency models. The proposed framework consists of three key steps including localized estimation, spatiotemporal refinement, and saliency update. Specifically, the initial saliency map of each frame in a video is first generated by using an existing saliency model. Then, by considering the temporal consistency and strong correlation among adjacent frames, the localized estimation models, which are generated by training the random forest regressor within a local temporal window, are employed to generate the temporary saliency map. Finally, by taking the appearance and motion information of salient objects into consideration, the spatiotemporal refinement step is deployed to further improve the temporary saliency map and generate the final saliency map. Furthermore, such an improved saliency map is then utilized to update the initial saliency map and provide reliable cues for saliency detection in the next frame. The experimental results on four challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to consistently and significantly improve the saliency detection performance of various video saliency models, thereby achieving the state-of-the-art performance.

Saliency and co-saliency detection aim to distinguish conspicuous foreground objects from single and multiple images, thus are essential in many multimedia and vision applications. To achieve balanced efficiency and accuracy, most recent successful saliency detectors are based on superpixels. However, saliency detection with single-scale superpixel segmentation may fail in capturing intrinsic salient objects of complex natural scenes with small-scale high-contrast backgrounds. To tackle this problem, we present a simple strategy using multiscale superpixels to jointly detect salient object via low-rank optimisation. Specifically, we first build a multiscale superpixel pyramid and derive the corresponding saliency map by multimodal saliency features and priors at each single scale. Then, we use joint low-rank analysis of multiscale saliency maps to obtain a more reliable and adaptively-fused saliency map, which properly takes all scales saliency into account. We further propose a GMM generative co-saliency prior to enable the above approach to detect co-salient objects from multiple images. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed saliency and co-saliency detector over state-of-the-arts.

Saliency detection is a technique to analyze image surroundings to extract relevant regions from the background. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective saliency detection method based on image sparse representation and color features combination. First, the input image is segmented into non-overlapping super-pixels, so as to perform the saliency detection at the region level to reduce computational complexity. Then, a background optimization selection scheme is used to construct an appropriate background template. Based on this, a primary saliency map is obtained by using image sparse representation. Next, through the linear combination of color coefficients we generate an improved saliency map with more prominent salient regions. Finally, the two saliency maps are integrated within Bayesian framework to obtain the final saliency map. Experimental results show that the proposed method has desirable detection performance in terms of detection accuracy and running time.

Salient object detection is a process of extracting an object which is visually attractive from a single image or a video. As a powerful technique for automatic image or video segmentation, saliency detection has been focused and studied recently. In this paper, we propose a novel method for salient object detection without training or learning-based techniques. The proposed framework consists of two major steps, the generation of saliency map candidates and the selection of an optimal saliency map. To generate saliency map candidates, prior maps based on combinations of RGB color components are proposed. To select the optimal saliency map among the candidates, we propose a compactness measure, which evaluates the degree to which the generated saliency maps show objects. As a result, among recent works on saliency detection, our saliency detection method achieves the highest performance in terms of saliency detection.

Nowadays, ship detection in sea-sky background is not only useful in maritime visual surveillance, but also helpful in maritime search and rescue. Since ships are salient objects in infrared images with sea-sky background, we present a novel and effective algorithm based on saliency for ship detection in this situation. Our algorithm adopts global saliency, local saliency and background prior to generate saliency maps. Ships are finally segmented in saliency maps. Our algorithm is compared with four classic salient object detection algorithms. And experimental results show our algorithm outperforms the other four algorithms in qualitative and quantitative terms. Keyword list: ship detection ; salient object detection ; infrared image ; sea - sky background . 1. INTRODUCTION Since ships are important vehicles for sea transportation, ship detection in sea-sky background is extensively used in maritime visual surveillance and reconnaissance, avoidance of ship collision accidents, maritime search and rescue, etc. Infrared imaging systems can almost work in any environment and all-weather conditions with its visual capacity in darkness and frog, which makes it a very suitable tool in this application. In recent years, ship detection in infrared images with sea-sky background attracts increasing attention. Many methods are proposed in this field, including image segmentation methods [1-2] and morphological methods [3]. However, due to complex sea-sky environment and large variation of ship sizes, these methods cannot solve the issue completely. And since ships are often salient objects in infrared images with sea-sky background, some researchers have recently tried salient object detection ideas used in color images [4-6]. And the paper is focused on using salient object detection methods to solve the issue. Salient objects are objects which stand out in the image and attract most people ¶VLPPHGLDWHDWWHQWLRQ7KHVWDQGDUGway to detect salient ob MHFWVLVILUVWO\XVLQJVDOLHQF\GHWHFWLRQPHWKRGVWRJHQHUDWHVDOLHQF\PDSVLQZKLFKDSL[HO¶VJUH\value is proportional to its degree of saliency and then segmenting salient objects in saliency maps. Many salient detection methods can be divided into three categories: local contrast methods, global rarity methods and other methods. In local contrast methods, regions which have high contrast with local neighbouring regions are regarded as salient regions. Itti et al. [7] decompose an image into several feature maps . The saliency in each feature map is measured by local center-surround difference in several scales and saliency of different feature maps are integrated to a final saliency

Though there are many computational models proposed for saliency detection, few of them take object boundary information into account. This paper presents a hierarchical saliency detection model incorporating probabilistic object boundaries, which is based on the observation that salient objects are generally surrounded by explicit boundaries and show contrast with their surroundings. We perform adaptive thresholding operation on ultrametric contour map, which leads to hierarchical image segmentations, and compute the saliency map for each layer based on the proposed robust center bias, border bias, color dissimilarity and spatial coherence measures. After a linear weighted combination of multi-layer saliency maps, and Bayesian enhancement procedure, the final saliency map is obtained. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms eight state-of-the-art saliency detection models.

Image saliency detection is very useful in many computer vision tasks while it still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new computational saliency detection model which is implemented with a coarse to fine strategy under the Bayesian framework. First, saliency points are applied to get a coarse location of the saliency region. And then, based on the rough region, we compute a prior map for the Bayesian model to achieve the final saliency map. Experimental results on a public available dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed prior map and the strength of our saliency map compared with several previous method.

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce an effective region-based solution for saliency detection. Then, we apply the achieved saliency map to better encode the image features for solving object recognition task. To find the perceptually and semantically meaningful salient regions, we extract superpixels based on an adaptive mean shift algorithm as the basic elements for saliency detection. The saliency of each superpixel is measured by using its spatial compactness, which is calculated according to the results of Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering. To propagate saliency between similar clusters, we adopt a modified PageRank algorithm to refine the saliency map. Our method not only improves saliency detection through large salient region detection and noise tolerance in messy background, but also generates saliency maps with a well-defined object shape. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Since the objects usually correspond to salient regions, and these regions usually play more important roles for object recognition than background, we apply our achieved saliency map for object recognition by incorporating a saliency map into sparse coding-based spatial pyramid matching (ScSPM) image representation. To learn a more discriminative codebook and better encode the features corresponding to the patches of the objects, we propose a weighted sparse coding for feature coding. Moreover, we also propose a saliency weighted max pooling to further emphasize the importance of those salient regions in feature pooling module. Experimental results on several datasets illustrate that our weighted ScSPM framework greatly outperforms ScSPM framework, and achieves excellent performance for object recognition.

This study presents an efficient saliency model mainly aiming at content-based applications such as salient object segmentation. The input colour image is first pre-segmented into a set of regions using the mean shift algorithm. A set of Gaussian models are estimated on the basis of segmented regions, and then for each pixel, a set of normalised colour likelihood measures to different Gaussian models are calculated. The colour saliency measure and spatial saliency measure of each Gaussian model are evaluated based on its colour distinctiveness and the spatial distribution, respectively. Finally, the pixel-wise colour saliency map and spatial saliency map are generated by summing the colour and spatial saliency measures of Gaussian models weighted by the normalised colour likelihood measures, and they are further combined to obtain the final saliency map. Experimental results on a dataset with 1000 images and ground truths demonstrate the better saliency detection performance of our saliency model.

Even though there have been great advancements in computer vision tasks, the development of human visual attention models is still not well investigated. In day-to-day life, one can find ample applications of saliency detection in image and video processing. This paper presents an efficient visual saliency detection model based on Ripplet transform, which aims at detecting the salient region and achieving higher Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC). Initially the feature maps are obtained from Ripplet transform in different scales and different directions of the image. The global and local saliency maps are computed based on the global probability density distribution and feature distribution of local areas, which are combined together to get the final saliency map. Ripplet-transform-based visual saliency detection is the novel approach carried out in this paper. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method based on Ripplet transformation can give excellent performance in terms of precision, recall, F measure and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and is compared with 10 state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets.

Intelligent surveillance systems enable secured visibility features in the smart city era. One of the major models for pre-processing in intelligent surveillance systems is known as saliency detection, which provides facilities for multiple tasks such as object detection, object segmentation, video coding, image re-targeting, image-quality assessment, and image compression. Traditional models focus on improving detection accuracy at the cost of high complexity. However, these models are computationally expensive for real-world systems. To cope with this issue, we propose a fast-motion saliency method for surveillance systems under various background conditions. Our method is derived from streaming dynamic mode decomposition (s-DMD), which is a powerful tool in data science. First, DMD computes a set of modes in a streaming manner to derive spatial–temporal features, and a raw saliency map is generated from the sparse reconstruction process. Second, the final saliency map is refined using a difference-of-Gaussians filter in the frequency domain. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on a standard benchmark dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy with lower complexity than state-of-the-art methods, which satisfies requirements in real-time applications.