Constrained maximization of saliency of intended object for guiding attention

Abstract

Saliency of an object in an image determines the attentiveness of the object with respect to human visual system. Saliency, in the absence of any external stimuli, is determined by contrast of features (like intensity, color, etc.) of the object with its surroundings. This paper proposes a novel technique to enhance the saliency of an object, which is not intrinsically salient. In order to enhance the attentiveness, the feature values of a used-defined target object (whose saliency has to be enhanced) should have more differences with the feature values of its surrounding objects. But too much modification of these values of the target object will destroy the naturalness of the image. So this problem of enhancing saliency of a target object is treated as a maximization problem under some constraints.