Object saliency using a background prior

What makes an object salient? Almost all the works so far determine object saliency based on the amount of the contrast of a patch or super pixel with it's surrounding. Due to this approach, objects consisting of multiple colors, which is usually the case with a majority of natural objects, are allocated varying saliency values. Hence, post-processing for it's application is another problem. Taking note of this and keeping in mind the ease of extension to different applications, we provide a new perspective to this problem. We propose a simple yet powerful method for modelling the background for salient object detection. As a corollary of "Rule of Thirds" we model the background as the most occurring super pixels lying along the image border. Saliency is determined based on the distance of other super pixels from the background super pixels. Comparison of the proposed approach with the state of the art shows how our approach can provide more consistent saliency values throughout an object.

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