Salient object detection based on regions

Abstract

Salient object detection aims to automatically localize the attractive objects with respect to surrounding background in an image. It can be applied to image browsing, image cropping, image compression, content-based image retrieval, and etc. In the literature, the low-level (pixel-based) features (e.g., color and gradient) were usually adopted for modeling and computing visual attention; these methods are straightforward and efficient but limited by performance, due to losing global organization and inference. Some recent works attempt to use the region-based features but often lead to incomplete object detection. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach of salient object detection using region-based representation, in which two novel region-based features are extracted for proposing salient map and the salient object are localized with a region growing algorithm. Its brief procedure includes: 1) image segmentation to get disjoint regions with characteristic consistency; 2) region clustering; 3) computation of the region-based center-surround feature and color-distribution feature; 4) combination of the two features to propose the saliency map; 5) region growing for detecting salient object. In the experiments, we evaluate our method with the public dataset provided by Microsoft Research Asia. The experimental results show that the new approach outperforms other four state-of-the-arts methods with regard to precision, recall and F-measure.