Quaternion-based salient region detection using scale space analysis

A salient region is the most distinctive part of the image that captures human's attention. Saliency detection is a fundamental characteristic of the human visual system. Finding computational models which are able to detect salient regions is a challenging task for image processing and computer vision applications. Salient regions of various sizes can be detected from different scales. Therefore, selecting the best scales is an important issue. In this paper, an efficient multi-scale method to find salient regions is proposed. In order to include more features in evaluating saliency of a pixel, feature maps are generated using components of both the RGB and YUV color spaces. These features are combined into quaternions. Detecting salient regions of different sizes is addressed by utilizing a scale space analysis. Salient regions are detected by convolving the image amplitude spectrum with a low-pass Gaussian kernel of multiple scales. To incorporate more meaningful information, more than one scale is considered based on entropy criterion. The final saliency map is generated by normalizing the weighted saliency maps of these scales. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of natural images to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method provides larger values of area under receiver operating characteristics curve, precision, recall and F-measure, in comparison to some of the state-of-the-art methods.