Salient Region Detection Based on Color Uniqueness and Color Spatial Distribution

In this study, we address the problem of salient region detection. Recently, saliency detection with contrast based approaches has shown to give promising results. However, different individual features exhibit different performance. In this paper, we show that the combination of color uniqueness and color spatial distribution is an effective way to detect saliency. A Color Adaptive Thresholding Watershed Fusion Segmentation (CAT-WFS) method is first given to retain boundary information and delete unnecessary details. Based on the segmentation, color uniqueness and color spatial distribution are defined separately. The color uniqueness denotes the color rareness of salient object, while the color spatial distribution represents the color attribute of the background. Aiming at highlighting the salient object and downplaying the background, we combine the two characters to generate the final saliency map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing salient object detection methods. key words: visual attention, saliency map, color uniqueness, color spatial distribution