Learning visual saliency with statistical priors

Abstract

Saliency is the quality by which any object or a pixel in an image stands out relative to its neighbours. Detecting such regions from an image is a crucial problem of research, since it has wide applications in advertising, automatic image compression, image thumbnailing, etc. In this paper, a salient region detection approach is proposed by using machine learning. In order to train the saliency model, low level features such as color channels and their probabilities, also probabilities using 3D color histograms, subband features along with statistical priors such as frequency prior, color prior, chance of happening (CoH) and center bias prior (CBP) are used. The proposed model is compared with existing state of art algorithms. Human eye fixation points are used to compare the models by estimating area under ROC curves. Other parameters such as precision, recall, F-measure are also used for comparison. This comparison shows that the proposed saliency model gives better performance than the existing salient region detection approaches.