Salient object detection via local saliency estimation and global homogeneity refinement

This paper presents a new hybrid approach for detecting salient objects in an image. It consists of two processes: local saliency estimation and global-homogeneity refinement. We model the salient object detection problem as a region growing and competition process by propagating the influence of foreground and background seed-patches. First, the initial local saliency of each image patch is measured by fusing local contrasts with spatial priors, thereby the seed-patches of foreground and background are constructed. Later, the global-homogeneous information is utilized to refine the saliency results by evaluating the ratio of the foreground and background likelihoods propagated from the seed-patches. Despite the idea is simple, our method can effectively achieve consistent performance for detecting object saliency. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can accomplish remarkable precision and recall rates with good computational efficiency. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.