Computing object-based saliency via locality-constrained linear coding and conditional random fields

Abstract

Predicting object location using a top-down saliency model has grown increasingly popular in recent years. In this work, we combine locality-constrained linear coding (LLC) with a conditional random field (CRF), and construct a top-down saliency model to generate a specific object-based saliency map. During the training phase, we use the LLC codes as the latent variables of the CRF model, and meanwhile learn a class-specific codebook by CRF modulation. In the testing phase, we use this top-down model to distinguish specific objects from a cluttered background. Finally, we evaluate the experimental results on the MSRA-B, Garz-02, Weizmann Horse, and Plane datasets by applying the developed object-based saliency model. The performance shows that our approach can not only improve the precision but also dramatically reduce the computational complexity.