Video saliency detection incorporating temporal information in compressed domain

•We propose a compressed video saliency model for which few attention is given to.•The characteristics of codec are considered to remove the effects of QP.•We use K-means clustering to statistically distinguish the motion attention level.•The visual window is built to strengthen the contrast of features.•The variance-like fusion method is used to compute the video saliency map.

Saliency detection is widely used to pick out relevant parts of a scene as visual attention regions for various image/video applications. Since video is increasingly being captured, moved and stored in compressed form, there is a need for detecting video saliency directly in compressed domain. In this study, a compressed video saliency detection algorithm is proposed based on discrete cosine transformation (DCT) coefficients and motion information within a visual window. Firstly, DCT coefficients and motion information are extracted from H.264 video bitstream without full decoding. Due to a high quantization parameter setting in encoder, skip/intra is easily chosen as the best prediction mode, resulting in a large number of blocks with zero motion vector and no residual existing in video bitstream. To address these problems, the motion vectors of skip/intra coded blocks are calculated by interpolating its surroundings. In addition, a visual window is constructed to enhance the contrast of features and to avoid being affected by encoder. Secondly, after spatial and temporal saliency maps being generated by the normalized entropy, a motion importance factor is imposed to refine the temporal saliency map. Finally, a variance-like fusion method is proposed to dynamically combine these maps to yield the final video saliency map. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art video saliency detection models.