RLP-AGMC: Robust label propagation for saliency detection based on an adaptive graph with multiview connections

Abstract There have been remarkable improvements in the salient object detection in the recent years. During the past few years, graph-based saliency detection algorithms have been proposed and made advances. Nevertheless, most of the state-of-the-art graph-based approaches are usually designed with low-level features, misleading assumption, fixed predefined graph structure and weak affinity matrix, which determine that they are not robust enough to handle images with complex or cluttered background. In this paper, we propose a robust label propagation-based mechanism for salient object detection throughout an adaptive graph to tackle above issues. Low-level features as well as deep features are integrated into the proposed framework to measure the similarity between different nodes. In addition, a robust mechanism is presented to calculate seeds based on the distribution of salient regions, which can achieve desirable results even if the object is in contact with the image boundary and the image scene is complex. Then, an adaptive graph with multiview connections is constructed based on different cues to learn the graph affinity matrix, which can better capture the characteristics between spatially adjacent and distant regions. Finally, a novel RLP-AGMC model, i.e. robust label propagation throughout an adaptive graph with multiview connections, is put forward to calculate saliency maps in combination with the obtained seed vectors. Comprehensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate the proposed method outperforms fourteen existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of various evaluation metrics.