Salient object detection based on multi-scale contrast

Neural Netw. 2018 May:101:47-56. doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2018.02.005. Epub 2018 Feb 13.

Abstract

Due to the development of deep learning networks, a salient object detection based on deep learning networks, which are used to extract the features, has made a great breakthrough compared to the traditional methods. At present, the salient object detection mainly relies on very deep convolutional network, which is used to extract the features. In deep learning networks, an dramatic increase of network depth may cause more training errors instead. In this paper, we use the residual network to increase network depth and to mitigate the errors caused by depth increase simultaneously. Inspired by image simplification, we use color and texture features to obtain simplified image with multiple scales by means of region assimilation on the basis of super-pixels in order to reduce the complexity of images and to improve the accuracy of salient target detection. We refine the feature on pixel level by the multi-scale feature correction method to avoid the feature error when the image is simplified at the above-mentioned region level. The final full connection layer not only integrates features of multi-scale and multi-level but also works as classifier of salient targets. The experimental results show that proposed model achieves better results than other salient object detection models based on original deep learning networks.

Keywords: Deep learning; Image simplification; Residual network; Saliency detection.

MeSH terms

  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Machine Learning
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*