Salient region detection via texture-suppressed background contrast

Abstract

We propose a novel salient region detection algorithm by texture-suppressed background contrast. We employ a structure extraction algorithm to suppress the small scale textures which are supposed to be not sensitive for human vision system. Then the texture-suppressed image is segmented into homogeneous superpixels. Motivated by the observation that the spatial distribution of the background has a high probability on the boundaries of images, we estimate the background as superpixels near the image boundaries. The saliency of each superpixel is then defined as the summation of its k minimum color distances to the estimated background superpixels. Finally a post-processing process involving spatial and color adjacency is employed to generate a per-pixel saliency map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.