Salient object detection via global and local cues

• We present a coding-based algorithm for salient object detection.
• Integration of local and global cues makes the saliency maps more accurate, intact.
• Bottom-up maps provide foreground and background codebooks for following steps.
• Fusion of FC and BC based results makes the saliency results more uniform, robust.
• Our coding-based method can be easily applied in other methods for improvement.

Previous saliency detection algorithms used to focus on low level features directly or utilize a bunch of sample images and manually labeled ground truth to train a high level learning model. In this paper, we propose a novel coding-based saliency measure by exploring both global and local cues for saliency computation. Firstly, we construct a bottom-up saliency map by considering global contrast information via low level features. Secondly, by using a locality-constrained linear coding algorithm, a top-down saliency map is formulated based on the reconstruction error. To better exploit the local and global information, we integrate the bottom-up and top-down maps as the final saliency map. Extensive experimental results on three large benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms 22 state-of-the-art methods in terms of three popular evaluation measures, i.e., the Precision and Recall curve, Area Under ROC Curve and F-measure value. Furthermore, the proposed coding-based method can be easily applied in other methods for significant improvement.