Saliency detection for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes

Saliency detection has been researched for conventional images with standard aspect ratios, however, it is a challenging problem for panoramic images with wide fields of view. In this paper, we propose a saliency detection algorithm for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes. We observe that a typical panoramic image includes several homogeneous background regions yielding horizontally elongated distributions, as well as multiple foreground objects with arbitrary locations. We first estimate the background of panoramic images by selecting homogeneous superpixels using geodesic similarity and analyzing their spatial distributions. Then we iteratively refine an initial saliency map derived from background estimation by computing the feature contrast only within local surrounding area whose range and shape are changed adaptively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm detects multiple salient objects faithfully while suppressing the background successfully, and it yields a significantly better performance of panorama saliency detection compared with the recent state-of-the-art techniques.