Saliency detection using joint spatial-color constraint and multi-scale segmentation

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to detect salient regions in images. To measure pixel-level saliency, joint spatial-color constraint is defined, i.e., spatial constraint (SC), color double-opponent (CD) constraint and similarity distribution (SD) constraint. The SC constraint is designed to produce global contrast with ability to distinguish the difference between “center and surround”. The CD constraint is introduced to extract intensive contrast of red-green and blue-yellow double opponency. The SD constraint is developed to detect the salient object and its background. A two-layer structure is adopted to merge the SC, CD and SD saliency into a saliency map. In order to obtain a consistent saliency map, the region-based saliency detection is performed by incorporating a multi-scale segmentation technique. The proposed method is evaluated on two image datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on salient region detection as well as human fixation prediction.

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► We define the joint spatial-color constraint to measure pixel-level saliency.
► The spatial constraint is designed to distinguish the difference between “center and surround”.
► The similarity distribution constraint is developed to detect the salient object and its background.
► The multi-scale segmentation technique is proposed to obtain a consistent saliency map.
► The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on salient region detection.