Saliency improvement through genetic programming

Visual saliency detection aims at finding regions of interest which contain relevant information in images. In the last years, several saliency methods have been proposed, however, it is still a challenging task in visualization, graphics and computer vision. Visual saliency has been useful in many tasks such as object segmentation, object detection, image retrieval, place recognition, human-computer interaction, among others. In this work, we present the design of a Genetic Programming Framework to improve the saliency maps generated from a determined saliency method. As output, we obtain a sequence of operators to improve a saliency map. We have tested this approach by using three saliency methods of the state-of-the-art. The validation of the generated solutions have been tested in three visual saliency image datasets. The results of the experiments show that the solution found by Genetic Programming outperforms the original input saliency model.