Low-Rank Matrix Recovery (LRMR) has recently been applied to saliency detection by decomposing image features into a low-rank component associated with background and a sparse component associated with visual salient regions. Despite its great potential, existing LRMR-based saliency detection methods seldom consider the inter-relationship among elements within these two components, thus are prone to generating scattered or incomplete saliency maps. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient LRMR-based saliency detection model under a coarse-to-fine framework to circumvent this limitation. First, we roughly measure the saliency of image regions with a baseline LRMR model that integrates a @math -norm sparsity constraint and a Laplacian regularization smooth term. Given samples from the coarse saliency map, we then learn a projection that maps image features to refined saliency values, to significantly sharpen the object boundaries and to preserve the object entirety. We evaluate our framework against existing LRMR based methods on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results validate the superiority of our method as well as the effectiveness of our suggested coarse-to-fine framework, especially for images containing multiple objects.
This paper addresses the problem of detecting salient areas within natural images. We shall mainly study the problem under unsupervised setting, i.e., saliency detection without learning from labeled images. A solution of multitask sparsity pursuit is proposed to integrate multiple types of features for detecting saliency collaboratively. Given an image described by multiple features, its saliency map is inferred by seeking the consistently sparse elements from the joint decompositions of multiple-feature matrices into pairs of low-rank and sparse matrices. The inference process is formulated as a constrained nuclear norm and as an l2,1 -norm minimization problem, which is convex and can be solved efficiently with an augmented Lagrange multiplier method. Compared with previous methods, which usually make use of multiple features by combining the saliency maps obtained from individual features, the proposed method seamlessly integrates multiple features to produce jointly the saliency map with a single inference step and thus produces more accurate and reliable results. In addition to the unsupervised setting, the proposed method can be also generalized to incorporate the top-down priors obtained from supervised environment. Extensive experiments well validate its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods.  To facilitate efficiency, most recent successful saliency detection methods are built on superpixel level. However, saliency detection with single-scale superpixel segmentation may fail in capturing the intrinsic salient objects in complex natural scenes with small-scale high-contrast backgrounds. To tackle this problem and realize more reliable saliency detection, we present a simple strategy using multiscale superpixels to jointly detect salient object via low-rank analysis. Specifically, we construct a multiscale superpixel pyramid and derive the corresponding saliency map using multiple saliency features and priors for each single scale at first. Then, we show that by joint low-rank analysis of multiscale saliency maps, we can obtain a more reliable adaptively fused saliency map that takes all scales saliency results into account. We further propose a GMM-based co-saliency prior to enable the above approach to detecting co-salient objects from multiple images. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we present a novel salient object detection method, efficiently combining Laplacian sparse subspace clustering (LSSC) and unified low-rank representation (ULRR). Unlike traditional low-rank matrix recovery (LRMR) based saliency detection methods which mainly extract saliency from pixels or super-pixels, our method advocates the saliency detection on the super-pixel clusters generated by LSSC. By doing so, our method succeeds in extracting large-size salient objects from cluttered backgrounds, against the detection of small-size salient objects from simple backgrounds obtained by most existing work. The entire algorithm is carried out in two stages: region clustering and cluster saliency detection. In the first stage, the input image is segmented into many super-pixels, and on top of it, they are further grouped into different clusters by using LSSC. Each cluster contains multiple super-pixels having similar features (e.g., colors and intensities), and may correspond to a part of a salient object in the foreground or a local region in the background. In the second stage, we formulate the saliency detection of each super-pixel cluster as a unified low-rankness and sparsity pursuit problem using a ULRR model, which integrates a Laplacian regularization term with respect to the sparse error matrix into the traditional low-rank representation (LRR) model. The whole model is based on a sensible cluster-consistency assumption that the spatially adjacent super-pixels within the same cluster should have similar saliency values, similar representation coefficients as well as similar reconstruction errors. In addition, we construct a primitive dictionary for the ULRR model in terms of the local-global color contrast of each super-pixel. On top of it, a global saliency measure covering the representation coefficients and a local saliency measure considering the sparse reconstruction errors are jointly employed to define the final saliency measure. Comprehensive experiments over diverse publicly available benchmark data sets demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Low-rank matrix recovery (LRMR) model, aiming at decomposing a matrix into a low-rank matrix and a sparse one, has shown the potential to address the problem of saliency detection, where the decomposed low-rank matrix naturally corresponds to the background, and the sparse one captures salient objects. This is under the assumption that the background is consistent and objects are obviously distinctive. Unfortunately, in real images, the background may be cluttered and may have low contrast with objects. Thus directly applying the LRMR model to the saliency detection has limited robustness. This paper proposes a novel approach that exploits bottom-up segmentation as a guidance cue of the matrix recovery. This method is fully unsupervised, yet obtains higher performance than the supervised LRMR model. A new challenging dataset PASCAL-1500 is also introduced to validate the saliency detection performance. Extensive evaluations on the widely used MSRA-1000 dataset and also on the new PASCAL-1500 dataset demonstrate that the proposed saliency model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. In this paper, we address the problem of fusing various saliency detection methods such that the fusion result outperforms each of the individual methods. We observe that the saliency regions shown in different saliency maps are with high probability covering parts of the salient object. With image regions being represented by the saliency values of multiple saliency maps, the object regions have strong correlation and thus lie in a low-dimensional subspace. Meanwhile, most of the background regions tend to have lower saliency values in various saliency maps. They are also strongly correlated and lie in a low-dimensional subspace that is independent of the object subspace. Therefore, an image can be represented as the combination of two low rank matrices. To obtain a unified low rank matrix that represents the salient object, this paper presents a double low rank matrix recovery model for saliency fusion. The inference process is formulated as a constrained nuclear norm minimization problem, which is convex and can be solved efficiently with the alternating direction method of multipliers. Furthermore, to reduce the computational complexity of the proposed saliency fusion method, a saliency model selection strategy based on the sparse representation is proposed. Experiments on five datasets show that our method consistently outperforms each individual saliency detection approach and other state-of-the-art saliency fusion methods. Detection of salient object regions is useful for many vision tasks. Recently, a variety of saliency detection models have been proposed. They often behave differently over an individual image, and these saliency detection results often complement each other. To make full use of the advantages of the existing saliency detection methods, in this paper, we propose a salience learning model which combines various saliency detection methods such that the aggregation result outperforms each individual one. In our model, we first obtain several saliency maps by different saliency detection methods. The background regions of each saliency map usually lie in a low-dimensional subspace as most of them tend to have lower salience values, while the object regions that deviating from this subspace can be considered as sparse noises. So, an individual saliency map can be represented as a low rank matrix plus a sparse matrix. We aim at learning a unified sparse matrix that represents the salient regions using these obtained individual saliency maps. The sparse matrix can be inferred by conducting low rank matrix recovery using the robust principal component analysis technique. Experiments show that our model consistently outperforms each individual saliency detection approach and state-of-the-art methods.