Salient Object Detection via Objectness Proposals

Sai Srivatsa R

Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur

R Venkatesh Babu

Video Analytics Lab, SERC
Indian Institute of Sciences
Bangalore

Salient object detection has become an important task in many image processing applications. The existing approaches exploit background prior and contrast prior to attain state of the art results. In this paper, instead of using background cues, we estimate the foreground regions in an image using objectness proposals and utilize it to obtain smooth and accurate saliency maps. We propose a novel saliency measure called ‘foreground connectivity’ which determines how tightly a pixel or a region is connected to the estimated foreground. We use the values assigned by this measure as foreground weights and integrate these in an optimization framework to obtain the final saliency maps. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark databases and demonstrate that the results obtained are better than the existing state of the art approaches.

Top row to bottom: Input images, Results of our saliency algorithm, Ground truth labeling.