Interpolation-tuned salient region detection

Image salient region detection is very useful in many multimedia applications, such as image retrieval, adaptive content delivery, and adaptive compression. Most existing methods are based on center-surround differences, usually detecting the differences around region boundaries, so these methods emphasize the high-contrast edges instead of detecting the regions. Different from traditional methods, our method smoothly propagates salient region information to the whole image by performing color interpolation and produces such saliency maps that uniformly highlight the whole salient regions and have high contrast between salient regions and backgrounds. We compare our method with five state-of-the-art salient region detection methods on a large public data set. The proposed method not only generates visually reasonable results but also achieves higher precision and better recall rates.