Improved salient object detection using hybrid Convolution Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract

Salient object detection is a critical and active field that aims at the detection of objects in a video, however, it draws increased attention among researchers. With increasing dynamic video data, the performance of saliency object detection method has been degrading with conventional object detection methods. The challenges lie with blurry moving targets, rapid movement of objects and background occlusion or dynamic background change on foreground regions in video frames. Such challenges result in poor saliency detection. In this paper, we design a deep learning model to address the issues, which uses a novel framework by combining the idea of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for video saliency detection. The proposed method aims at developing a spatiotemporal model that exploits temporal, spatial and local constraint cues to achieve global optimization. The task of finding the salient objects in benchmark dynamic video datasets is then carried out by capturing the temporal, spatial and local constraint features with the Convolution Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN). The CRNN is evaluated on benchmark datasets against conventional video salient object detection methods in terms of precision, F-measure, mean absolute error (MAE) and computational load. The experiments reveal that the CRNN model achieves improved performance than other state-of-the-art saliency models in terms of increased speed and reduced computational load.