Global contrast based salient region detection

Reliable estimation of visual saliency allows appropriate processing of images without prior knowledge of their con-tents, and thus remains an important step in many computer vision tasks including image segmentation, object recog-nition, and adaptive compression. We propose a regional contrast based saliency extraction algorithm, which simul-taneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial coherence. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, and yields full resolution saliency maps. Our algorithm con-sistently outperformed existing saliency detection methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates, when eval-uated using one of the largest publicly available data sets. We also demonstrate how the extracted saliency map can be used to create high quality segmentation masks for sub-sequent image processing. 1