Salient Object Segmentation via Effective Integration of Saliency and Objectness

• Published in: IEEE transactions on multimedia Vol. 19; no. 8; pp. 1742 - 1756
• Main Authors: Ye, Linwei, Liu, Zhi, Li, Lina, Shen, Liquan, Bai, Cong, Wang, Yang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.08.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; Computer science; Graph-based integration; Image color analysis; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; object probability; Object segmentation; objectness map; Predictive models; Salience; saliency map; salient object segmentation; Shortest-path problems
• ISSN: 1520-9210; 1941-0077
• DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2017.2693022

This paper proposes an effective salient object segmentation method via the graph-based integration of saliency and objectness. Based on the superpixel segmentation result of the input image, a graph is built to represent superpixels using regular vertex, background seed vertex with the addition of a terminal vertex. The edge weights on the graph are defined by integrating the difference of appearance, saliency, and objectness between superpixels. Then, the object probability of each superpixel is measured by finding the shortest path from the corresponding vertex to the terminal vertex on the graph, and the resultant object probability map can generally better highlight salient objects and suppress background regions compared to both saliency map and objectness map. Finally, the object probability map is used to initialize salient object and background, and effectively incorporated into the framework of graph cut to obtain the final salient object segmentation result. Extensive experimental results on three public benchmark datasets show that the proposed method consistently improves the salient object segmentation performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art salient object segmentation methods. Furthermore, experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed graph-based integration method is more effective than other fusion schemes and robust to saliency maps generated using various saliency models.