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Salient object detection using color spatial distribution and minimum spanning tree weight

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Abstract

Salient object detection is very useful in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation, content-based image editing and object recognition. In this paper, we present a salient object detection algorithm by using color spatial distribution (CSD) and minimum spanning tree weight (MSTW). We first use a segmentation algorithm to decompose an image into superpixel-level elements, then use these elements as nodes to construct a minimum spanning tree (MST), each connected edge weight is the mean color difference between two nodes. CSD of each element can be computed by integrating color, spatial distance and MSTW. Note that if the color of one element is the most widely distributed over the entire image, it should have the biggest CSD value, we regard this element as a background node (BG Node). Then we use the MSTW between other element and BG node to generate a MSTW map. The superpixel-level saliency map can be obtained by combining the CSD map and MSTW map. Finally, we use a guided filter to get the pixel-level saliency map. Experimental results on two databases demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other previous state-of-the-art approaches.

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Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the 863 Program of China (2012AA03A301), NSFC (61201179 and 91320201), Ph.D. Pro-grams Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (20130032110010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Chang Tang & Chunping Hou

  2. School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

    Pichao Wang

  3. School of Science and SKL of HESS, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Zhanjie Song

Authors
  1. Chang Tang
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  2. Chunping Hou
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  3. Pichao Wang
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  4. Zhanjie Song
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Correspondence to Zhanjie Song.

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Tang, C., Hou, C., Wang, P. et al. Salient object detection using color spatial distribution and minimum spanning tree weight. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 6963–6978 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2622-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2622-5

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