Automatic salient object segmentation using saliency map and color segmentation

HAN Sung-ho¹, JUNG Gye-dong², LEE Sangh-yuk³, HONG Yeong-pyo⁴, LEE Sang-hun²

(1. Department of Plasmabiodisplay, Kwangwoon University, Seoul 139-701, Korea;
2. Department of General Education, Kwangwoon University, Seoul 139-701, Korea;
3. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou 215123, China;
4. Department of Hospital Management, International University of Korea, Jinju 660-789, Korea)

Abstract:A new method for automatic salient object segmentation is presented. Salient object segmentation is an important research area in the field of object recognition, image retrieval, image editing, scene reconstruction, and 2D/3D conversion. In this work, salient object segmentation is performed using saliency map and color segmentation. Edge, color and intensity feature are extracted from mean shift segmentation (MSS) image, and saliency map is created using these features. First average saliency per segment image is calculated using the color information from MSS image and generated saliency map. Then, second average saliency per segment image is calculated by applying same procedure for the first image to the thresholding, labeling, and hole-filling applied image. Thresholding, labeling and hole-filling are applied to the mean image of the generated two images to get the final salient object segmentation. The effectiveness of proposed method is proved by showing 80%, 89% and 80% of precision, recall and F-measure values from the generated salient object segmentation image and ground truth image.

Key words:salient object; visual attention; saliency map; color segmentation