A shape preserving approach for salient object detection using convolutional neural networks

Determining visual saliency is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision as the saliency not only identifies the most informative parts of a visual scene but may also reduce computational complexity by filtering out irrelevant segments of the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency object detection method that combines a shape-preserving saliency prediction driven by a convolutional neural network with the mid and low-level region preserving image information. Our model learns a saliency shape dictionary, which is subsequently used to train a CNN to predict the salient class of a target region and estimate the full but coarse saliency map of the target image. The map is then refined using image specific low-to-mid level information. Performance evaluation on popular benchmark datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in saliency detection.