A Factorization Approach to Grouping

The foreground group in a scene may be ‘discovered’ and computed as a factorized approximation to the pairwise affinity of the elements in the scene. A pointwise approximation of the pairwise affinity information may in fact be interpreted as a ‘saliency’ index, and the foreground of the scene may be obtained by thresholding it. An algorithm called ‘affinity factorization’ is thus obtained which may be used for grouping.