Learning Optimal Seeds for Ranking Saliency

A variety of methods have been developed for visual saliency analysis, and it is a challenge to detect the most important scene from the input image. In this paper, to improve the shortage that the spatial connectivity of every node in model only via the k-regular graph and the idealistic boundary prior assumption is used in graph-based manifold ranking, we present a new optimal seed method to get saliency map. First, we evaluate the salience value of each region by global contrast-based spatial and color feature. Second, the salience values of the first stage are used to optimize the background and foreground queries (seeds); meanwhile, we tackle boundary cues from hierarchical graph to optimize background seeds. Then, we derive each stage saliency measure by the classical manifold ranking after obtaining optimal seeds. Finally, the final saliency map is obtained by combining the saliency results of two stages. Our algorithm is tested on the five public datasets and compared with nine state-of-the-art methods; the quantitative evaluation indicates that our method is effective and efficient. Our method can handle complex images with different details and can produce more accurate saliency maps than other state-of-the-art approaches.