Object recognition via contextual color attention

•We uniformly highlight the objects using the top-down color attention map.•The strong patches are found based on the inter-class color dissimilarity.•We obtain the false weak patches using the contextual color attention.•The attention of the object patches are given the same and high attention.

Visual attention is effective in differentiating an object from its surroundings. Color is used to guide attention via a top-down category-specific attention map in the top-down color attention (CA) method. To uniformly highlight the entire object, our color attention map is reconstructed based on the estimated object patches. The object patches consist of strong patches and false weak patches whose contextual color attention values are beyond the optimal threshold of class-specific contextual color attention. The color attention map constructed by the object color histogram is then used to weight the local shape for object recognition. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that our method can provide state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets.