Region Diversity Based Saliency Density Maximization for Salient Object Detection

Existing salient object detection methods either simply use a threshold to detect desired salient objects from saliency map or search the most promising rectangular window covering salient objects on the saliency map. There are two problems in the existing methods: 1) The performance of threshold-dependent methods depends on a threshold selection and it is difficult to select an appropriate threshold value. 2) The rectangular window not only covers the salient object but also contains background pixels, which leads to imprecise salient object detection. For solving these problems, a novel saliency threshold-free method for detecting the salient object with a well-defined boundary is proposed in this paper. We propose a novel window search algorithm to locate a rectangular window on our saliency map, which contains as many as possible pixels belonging the salient object and as few as possible background pixels. Once the window is determined, GrabCut is applied to extract salient object with a well-defined boundary. Compared with existing methods, our approach doesn't need any threshold to binarize the saliency map and additional operations. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms 4 state-of-the-art salient object detection methods, yielding higher precision and better F-Measure.