High-level background prior based salient object detection

Abstract Salient object detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Existing methods using only low-level features failed to uniformly highlight the salient object regions. In order to combine high-level saliency priors and low-level appearance cues, we propose a novel Background Prior based Salient detection method (BPS) for high-quality salient object detection. Different from other background prior based methods, a background estimation is added before performing saliency detection. We utilize the distribution of bounding boxes generated by a generic object proposal method to obtain background information. Three background priors are mainly considered to model the saliency, namely background connectivity prior, background contrast prior and spatial distribution prior, allowing the proposed method to highlight the salient object as a whole and suppress background clutters. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets validate that our method outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, while being more efficient than most leading methods.