Background contrast based salient region detection

This paper proposes a novel salient region detection method based on background contrast. Salient regions are widely considered as those distinct to the image background. However, owning to the lack of information about the image background, existing methods measure saliency of an image pixel/region using its contrast to local neighborhoods or the entire image rather than the image background. Inappropriate contrast region leads to difficulty in highlighting the whole large salient region. In this paper, we discover that the absence of eye fixations provides an important clue to the image background. Regions without eye fixations are very likely the image background. To further acquire the spatial extent of image background, the complementary area of the convex-hull of eye fixations is used to represent the possible image background. Then we measure the saliency of each region by computing its contrast to the estimated image background. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.