Saliency Optimization from Robust Background Detection

• Published in: 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition pp. 2814 - 2821
• Main Authors: Zhu, Wangjiang, Liang, Shuang, Wei, Yichen, Sun, Jian
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2014
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; Boundaries; Computer vision; Conferences; Cues; Image color analysis; Layout; Object detection; Optimization; Pattern recognition; Robustness; State of the art
• ISSN: 1063-6919; 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2014.360

Recent progresses in salient object detection have exploited the boundary prior, or background information, to assist other saliency cues such as contrast, achieving state-of-the-art results. However, their usage of boundary prior is very simple, fragile, and the integration with other cues is mostly heuristic. In this work, we present new methods to address these issues. First, we propose a robust background measure, called boundary connectivity. It characterizes the spatial layout of image regions with respect to image boundaries and is much more robust. It has an intuitive geometrical interpretation and presents unique benefits that are absent in previous saliency measures. Second, we propose a principled optimization framework to integrate multiple low level cues, including our background measure, to obtain clean and uniform saliency maps. Our formulation is intuitive, efficient and achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets.