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Learning Complementary Saliency Priors for Foreground Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes

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Abstract

Object segmentation is widely recognized as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision. One major problem of existing methods is that most of them are vulnerable to the cluttered background. Moreover, human intervention is often required to specify foreground/background priors, which restricts the usage of object segmentation in real-world scenario. To address these problems, we propose a novel approach to learn complementary saliency priors for foreground object segmentation in complex scenes. Different from existing saliency-based segmentation approaches, we propose to learn two complementary saliency maps that reveal the most reliable foreground and background regions. Given such priors, foreground object segmentation is formulated as a binary pixel labelling problem that can be efficiently solved using graph cuts. As such, the confident saliency priors can be utilized to extract the most salient objects and reduce the distraction of cluttered background. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms 16 state-of-the-art methods remarkably on three public image benchmarks.

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Notes

  1. In our implementation, we add a very small positive number to the value in every \(\log \) function to avoid yielding infinity and make problems have feasible solutions.

  2. As in many previous works, we divide images into macro-blocks and all pixels in a block are assumed to share the same parameter. In our experiments, each block covers \(4\times 4\) pixels for an image resized to the resolution \(320\times 240\).

  3. In our implementation, we use \(\delta _\perp * avg(\mathcal {S}^{+})\) and \(\delta _\perp * avg(\mathcal {S}^{-})\) to perform the binarization.

  4. The two thresholds are \(\delta _s * avg(\mathcal {S})\) and \(\frac{1}{\delta _s} * avg(\mathcal {S})\), while \(\delta _s \in (0,1] \) is learned via experiments on the validation set, in a similar way to \(\delta _\perp \) in our approach.

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Correspondence to Yonghong Tian or Jia Li.

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Communicated by M. Hebert.

This work was supported in part by grants from the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation under contract No. 61035001, No. 61370113, and No. 61390515, and the Supervisor Award Funding for Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of Beijing (No. 20128000103).

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Tian, Y., Li, J., Yu, S. et al. Learning Complementary Saliency Priors for Foreground Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes. Int J Comput Vis 111, 153–170 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-014-0737-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-014-0737-1

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