The goal of this research is to detect and segment salient regions in an image.
Detection of salient image regions is useful for applications like image segmentation, adaptive compression, and region-based image retrieval. In this paper we present a novel method to determine salient regions in images using low-level features of luminance and color. The method is fast, easy to implement and generates high quality saliency maps of the same size and resolution as the input image.We demonstrate the use of the algorithm in the segmentation of semantically meaningful whole objects from digital images.
The results of our work are shown below. The images below, from left to right, are: the original image, saliency map using Itti's method, segmentation result using Itti's map, saliency map using our method, and finally, the segmentation result using our method.
Sabine Süsstrunk
Francicso Estrada
This work is supported by National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS), a center supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 5005-67322, and by K-Space, the European Network of Excellence in Knowledge Space of semantic inference for automatic annotation and retrieval of multimedia content.