Salient region detection using patch level and region level image abstractions

Abstract

In this letter, a novel salient region detection approach is proposed. Firstly, color contrast cue and color distribution cue are computed by exploiting patch level and region level image abstractions in a unified way, where these two cues are fused to compute an initial saliency map. A simple and computationally efficient adaptive saliency refinement approach is applied to suppress saliency of background noises, and to emphasize saliency of objects uniformly. Finally, the saliency map is computed by integrating the refined saliency map with center prior map. In order to compensate different needs in speed/accuracy tradeoff, three variants of the proposed approach are also presented in this letter. The experimental results on a large image dataset show that the proposed approach achieve the best performance over several state-of-the-art approaches.