Vilaplana V. Saliency Maps on Image Hierarchies. Signal Processing: Image Communication. Special Issue on Recent Advances in Saliency Models, Applications and Evaluations. 2015;38:84-99.

Abstract

In this paper we propose two saliency models for salient object segmentation based on a hierarchical image segmentation, a tree-like structure that represents regions at dierent scales from the details to the whole image (e.g. gPb-UCM, BPT). The first model is based on a hierarchy of image partitions. The saliency at each level is computed on a region basis, taking into account the contrast between regions. The maps obtained for the dierent partitions are then integrated into a nal saliency map. The second model directly works on the structure created by the segmentation algorithm, computing saliency at each node and integrating these cues in a straightforward manner into a single saliency map. We show that the proposed models produce high quality saliency maps. Objective evaluation demonstrates that the two methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in several benchmark datasets.

Demos and Resources